Hermes Award 2024 of the Hannover Messe

The three companies nominated for the Hermes Award 2024 at the Hannover Messe have been announced: Bosch Rexroth, Schunk and Siemens (listed in alphabetical order).

The three companies were nominated by an independent jury of experts from politics, business, research and society, chaired by Prof. Dr. Holger Hanselka, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

The winner will be announced at the opening ceremony of the Hannover Messe on 21 April 2024 in the presence of Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Federal Minister of Education and Research, will present the award.

For more than 20 years, Hannover Messe organizer Deutsche Messe AG has honoured a company with the Hermes Award every year at the Hannover Messe. According to Deutsche Messe AG, this is the most important international industry prize. It honours a product or solution with a particularly high degree of technological innovation. Market maturity is an important criterion. "The creativity and innovative strength of the applications submitted was once again outstanding this year," explains 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-orientated society."

The three nominated companies

Bosch Rexroth, Lohr am Main: The project nominated 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, Lauffen/Neckar: The 2D Grasping Kit project has been nominated. 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, Munich: The nominated product is the SiGREEN CO2 management tool. 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.

Hannover Messe

Hannover Messe sees itself as the world's leading trade fair for industry. Its main theme "Industrial Transformation" brings together exhibiting companies from the mechanical engineering, electrical and digital industries as well as the energy sector to present solutions for the production and energy supply of the future. The top themes include Industry 4.0 / Manufacturing-X, energy for industry, digitalisation / artificial intelligence and machine learning, CO2-neutral production as well as hydrogen and fuel cells. Conferences and forums round off the programme. The next edition will be held in Hanover from 22 to 26 April 2024. The partner country of Hannover Messe 2024 is Norway.