The Robotics Award honors innovative applied robotics solutions. The prize is awarded by Deutsche Messe together with the Robotation Academy and the Industrieanzeiger for the ninth time at the Hannover Messe. The jury has selected these three finalists from all the applications:

Forwardttc and Kuka are competing together. They are taking part with a charging assistant for electric cars in private and commercial use. The project is a collaboration that is currently in the development stage. The fully automatic charging process of the low-cost development can be started by remote control or app. However, it is also transferable to new fuels such as hydrogen. The number of components is reduced thanks to a special safety concept (combination of strong and weak drives).

Maskor, the Institute for Mobile Autonomous Systems and Cognitive Robotics at Aachen University of Applied Sciences, is competing for the Robotics Award with its autonomous field robot Etarob. Its field of activity is economic weed control. The ETAS-B field robot software learns plants through virtual training data and can navigate freely in an unstructured environment and avoid obstacles. Selective weed control is carried out using current pulses. Etarob is effective because the weeds are uprooted. The hardware and software come from the Maskor Institute.

OnRobot is participating in the Robotics Award with the Gecko Gripper, a new type of gripping technology for lightweight robots. The company's gripping technology is based on gecko feet. The biologically inspired approach uses millions of microscopic hairs to generate Van der Waals forces on contact with an object surface. This in turn results in adhesion and shear adhesion. Objects can be held without the need for additional force or energy. The gripping process can be released by slightly tilting the holding surfaces.