Deutsche Messe has been presenting the Hermes Award at the Hannover Messe for over 20 years. Exhibitors at the trade fair can apply. A jury headed by Prof. Holger Hanselka, President of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, has now selected the three nominees from this pool: Bosch Rexroth, Schunk and Siemens. Prof. Hanselka: "The three nominated products represent the range of modern production technology issues: Automation, recycling and resource-conserving supply chains. They thus demonstrate the importance of manufacturing technologies for a future-oriented society.

The nominees

The nominated project from Bosch Rexroth is a system for the industrial dismantling and recycling of batteries from electrically powered vehicles. This automation solution for transporting, contacting, diagnosing, deep discharging and recycling batteries speeds up the process by a factor of 100. The discharge energy from the batteries is used directly in the process or fed into the supply network. Recycling allows up to 95 percent of the chemical elements to be fed back into the production process and thus reused in a targeted manner.

Schunk was nominated for the '2D Grasping Kit'. his application kit consists of a camera with lens, an industrial PC, AI software and an application-specific gripper. The innovation lies in the generic, AI-based modeling of component variants and the transfer to a smaller training data set, which reduces training times for recognition. The intuitive user interface enables the reliable handling of different, randomly arranged parts from a conveyor belt, tray or supply table - even with changing light, color or background conditions. This allows recurring sorting or logistics tasks to be automated with little effort.

Siemens was nominated as the third candidate with its 'SiGREEN'_{CO2 management tool}. This makes emissions along the entire supply chain transparent in real time and thus addressable. The system is based on real data instead of statistical averages and enables mapping along the supply chain as a basis for reducing the product carbon footprint (PCF). Sensitive data is exchanged across companies in a secure environment. SiGREEN thus makes a contribution to sustainability and enables companies to verify the PCF for supply chains and products at any time.