EURON/erf Technology Transfer Award

Second edition

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 table soccer-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.

The Technology Transfer Award finalists.
Pictures by Helge Huttenrauch of KTH.

Congratulations also to the runners up:

• iFork-Project: Flexible AGV System, an AGV which successfully adjusts on-line to moving obstacles and changes in its factory environments. iFork was presented by Humberto Martínez Barberá of the Universidad de Murcia, Spain.
• "Automated People Movers" focussing on comfort, safety, and cost-effectiveness, was presented by François Hirigoyen of Robosoft, France.
• Roboclimber, the climbing and drilling robot under development by a strong group of leading companies and universities in Europe. "ROBOCLIMBER-a tele-operated climbing robot for slope consolidation and landslide monitoring" was presented by Rezia Molfino of the University of Genova, Italy.

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