The KUKA Innovation Award 2022 primarily targets the interaction of robotic systems with humans in the medical application field. This includes applications with direct interaction with a patient for diagnosis, rehabilitation, surgery and other forms of therapy. Using a robotic system, we would like to encourage participants to improve our ability to monitor health and to prevent, detect, treat and manage disease and to test and demonstrate new models and tools for health and care delivery. In addition, we are targeting patient and elderly care and supporting activities such as handling and logistics in a hospital workflow. 

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.