Hannover. The winner will be announced at the opening ceremony of HANNOVER MESSE on April 21, 2024, to be attended by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The award will be presented by Bettina Stark-Watzinger, German Federal Minister of Education and Research.

For more than 20 years, Deutsche Messe AG has presented the HERMES AWARD to one company each year at HANNOVER MESSE. This is the most important international prize in the industry. The award acknowledges a product or solution that demonstrates a notably high level of technological innovation. Market maturity is an important criterion here. Jury chairperson and President of the Fraunhofer Society, Prof. Holger Hanselka, said "Once again this year, the applications submitted showcased outstanding creativity and innovative strength. 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. I am excited about the upcoming direct exchange with these innovators and others at the Hannover Messe."

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 per cent 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 is the world's leading trade fair for industry. Its lead theme of "Energizing a Sustainable Industry“ brings together exhibiting companies from the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and digital industries as well as the energy sector to present solutions for future production methods and the energy supply. Key topics include Industrie 4.0/Manufacturing-X, Energy for Industry, Digitisation/Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Carbon-neutral Production, and Hydrogen and Fuel Cells. The program is complemented by a series of conferences and forums. The next edition of the event runs in Hannover, Germany, from 22 to 26 April 2024. Norway is the partner country.