Hermes Award 2025 again announced by Deutsche Messe
The Hermes Award 2025 will once again be presented by Deutsche Messe AG on the occasion of Hannover Messe 2025. This is one of the world's most important industry awards. It will be awarded on March 30, 2025, and applications are now open.
Companies and institutions participating in the Hannover Messe can apply for the prestigious Hermes Award until January 31, 2025. It will be presented by the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, on March 30, 2025. In addition to the Hermes Award, the Hermes Startup Award will once again be announced. Every year, Deutsche Messe presents this award to a company whose product or solution demonstrates a particularly high degree of technological innovation. Only technology solutions that have already been tried and tested in industry are considered. An independent jury chaired by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Holger Hanselka, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, nominates three products each for the Hermes Award and the Hermes Startup Award. The respective winners are selected from this group. The criteria of technological innovation, benefits for industry, the environment and society, cost-effectiveness and readiness for implementation play a prominent role in the assessment of prize worthiness.
The Hermes Award 2024 went to Schunk. The award went to the 2D Grasping Kit project. This 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 means that recurring sorting or logistics tasks can be automated with little effort.