2008 IERA Forum and Invention and Entrepreneurship Award

The IFR/IEEE Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum was held on June 11, 2008 in Munich, Germany. The Forum is cosponsored by RAS and the International Federation of Robotics, whose members include robotics and automation manufacturers and suppliers and institutional members. The 2008 Forum was hosted by IFR, in conjunction with Robotik 2008, Germany’s largest robotics conference and exhibition and with Automatica 2008. The program included a ‘workshop for entrepreneurs’ . This included talks by Bruno Siciliano of the Prisma Lab at the University of Naples, who discussed examples of successful collaborations between university researchers and businesses, and by A.J.N. (Albert) van Breemen, founder of Personal Robotics, http://www.PersonalRobotics.nl, who spoke on The Future of Personal Robotics.

The afternoon session featured presentations by the five finalists for the IEEE/IFR Invention and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation Award. The following two teams were chosen as co-recipients of the 2008 award:

Mick Mountz, Pete Wurman of Kiva Systems,Woburn MA, USA (www.kivasystems.com) and Raffaello D’Andrea of ETH-Zurich and an Engineering Fellow of Kiva Systems, were honored for their development of the Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System, in which pallets, cases, and orders are stored on inventory pods that are picked up and moved by a fleet of mobile robotic drive units to any operator on the factory floor.

Thomas Brandstetter, Dieter Steegmüller and Michael Zürn, all at Mercedes-Benz Cars, Stuttgart, Germany, were honored for their role in the development of the Assembly 21: innovative system and assembly concept for rear axle assembly for the new C-Class with cooperating robot teams.

“ The winners (KIVA and Assembly21) were selected from different points of view. KIVA is really a startup by a few persons and reaching good business within just a few years; very much in line with the intention of the award,” said IERA Awards Co-chair Klas Nilsson.

“The Assembly21 at Daimler is an industrial and very impressive system including 40 robots working together, and with human operations included in the total work flow. Such innovations and the initiative to convince top-management in a big company (to put in the resources needed) is as well a very good example of outstanding/valuable results. In total, both winners (and the other finalist) very well represent and promote innovative robotics.”

Other finalists were Rune Klausen Larsen and Ivar Balslev of Scape Technologies A/S, Odense C, Denmark): The Scape Bin-Picker; Elliot Duff of CSIRO-ICT, Australia: MINEGEMTM – an autonomous underground loader; and Joachim Melis and Matt Bjork of Adept Technology, Livermore CA, USA: The Adept Quattro s650 Robot..

Information about all the finalists is available on the RAS Industrial Activities Board website. http://www.ieee-ras.org/industrial.