A press release about the second award is available in HTML or DOC format, also a JPG picture.

CONGRATULATIONS! to the two winners of the second Technology Transfer Award:

Star-Kick, the table football robot developed by Freiburg University and Adp Gauselmann AG. A complete and functional protoype developed by Freiburg University received favourable media attention and was therefore licensed by Adp Gauselmann AG. Gauselmann AG developed specialized hardware and marketed Star-Kick. Thilo Weigel and colleagues from Freiburg University adapted and further improved the software to make it sufficiently user friendly, robust, and efficient.

This robot is now available commercially, playing at the level of an advanced human player. This work is continuing in order to raise the playing level to a world champion level.

Thilo Weigel of the University of Freiburg presented "A tablesoccer-robot for applied science and the toy market" at the Euron Annual meeting and collected the award at the dinner. Star-Kick represents a successful example of how the prototype of an academic robotic system has been further developed into a market ready product.

"Open platform for skilled motions in productive robotics", which enables the use of advanced sensor-based control in combination with industrially compatible robot systems. The control system technique was one of the results from project AUTOFETT, an affordable and flexible system for the automated fettling and finishing of castings. The project partnership included nine partners (suppliers, integrators, users and researchers) representing seven Member States from different parts of Europe.
Klas Nilsson and Anders Robertsson from Lund University, Sweden, presented the platform and some resulting robot products. They share the award with Mats Isaksson from ABB Robotics. Several other people also made key contributions to this very successful industry-academia collaboration.

Congratulations also to the runners up:

Details of the first, second, third and fourth Technology Transfer Award Winners.

We hope that you will get involved in many of EURON's activities and encourage others to do so as well.

Attending meetings is an excellent way of making contacts and friends within the community. The Annual Meetings are the major instrument for this purpose.

A lot of things are happening all the time in the European robotics community: conferences and workshops are being organised, projects are starting, job offers are announced, etc. The EURON mailing list is the place-to-be for all your communications around these topics.