The winners of the KUKA Innovation Award 2021 have been announced: The Belgian research team Chorrobot convinced the jury with its innovative concept to automate demanding two-handed tasks and won the popular innovation competition on the topic of artificial intelligence. The Innovation Award is worth 20,000 euros.
Innovation Award 2021: Artificial Intelligence Challenge
By adding artificial intelligence to existing robot systems, the aim is to revolutionize the way humans and robots work together. This year's competition therefore focused on new use cases in which robots have so far faced major challenges in interacting with their real environment. Among the numerous applications for the tender on the subject of AI, an international jury of experts selected the five best concepts. To enable the finalists to realize these KUKA was providing them with a sensitive lightweight robot LBR iiwa and a 3D vision sensor from Roboception free of charge and they also received coaching from KUKA experts throughout the competition.
At the HM Digital Edition, which was broadcast entirely digitally due to the coronavirus pandemic, from April 12-16, 2021. An international jury selected the winner of the award during Hannover Messe 2021. The winner of the 20,000 euro KUKA Innovation Award 2021 is the Belgian team „Chorrobot“ of Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Flanders Make@KU Leuven. In a virtual ceremony, Dr. Kristina Wagner, Vice President Corporate Research, presented the award.
About the KUKA Innovation Award
KUKA has been sponsoring the KUKA Innovation Award every year for the past eight years. In 2014, KUKA launched the Innovation Competition to drive innovation in robot-based automation and promote technology transfer from research to industry. It addresses developers, graduates and research teams of companies or universities.
The participants develop ideas for a task specified by KUKA. The focus is on a different technology each year. An international jury of experts selects the finalists from all the submitted applications. These final teams implement their projects with the aid of KUKA robots and other technologies such as vision systems and present the results to a wide audience of experts at a trade fair. Thereby, KUKA enables them to make a professional trade fair appearance at large, international trade fairs such as the Hannover Messe, the automatica or the MEDICA medical trade fair. At the end of the trade fair week, the jury of experts chooses the winner of the prize. At the end of the trade show week, the jury of experts will select the winner of the award. Prize money of 20,000 euros awaits the winner. The award was presented for the first time at automatica 2014.