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 whole gamut of modern production technology issues is represented by the three nominated products: automation, recycling and resource-conserving supply chains. In this way, they demonstrate the importance of manufacturing technologies for a society looking toward the future.«

The nominated projects

The nominated project from Bosch Rexroth is a system designed for the industrial dismantling and recycling of batteries used in electric vehicles. The process of transporting, contacting, diagnosing, exhaustive discharging, and recycling batteries is accelerated by a factor of 100 with this automation solution. The energy discharged from the batteries is used directly in the process or fed into the power grid. Recycling allows up to 95 percent of the chemical elements to be returned to the production process, and thus reused in a targeted manner.

Schunk was nominated for the '2D Grasping Kit'. This application kit consists of a camera with lens, an industrial PC, AI software and an application-specific gripper. What is innovative is the AI-based modeling of component variants, and the transfer to a smaller training data set, which reduces training times for recognition. Even under changing light, color, or background conditions, the intuitive user interface allows for the reliable handling of various parts that are randomly arranged on a conveyor belt, tray, or supply table. This allows repetitive sorting or logistics tasks to be automated with little outlay.

Siemens was nominated as the third candidate with its CO₂ management tool 'SiGREEN'.  This makes emissions along the entire supply chain transparent in real time, allowing them to be tackled. The system uses actual data instead of statistical averages, and allows for mapping throughout the supply chain to help decrease the product carbon footprint (PCF). Sensitive data is exchanged across companies within a protected space. In this way, SiGREEN contributes to sustainability and allows companies to verify the PCF for supply chains and products at any time.