SCHUNK started off the Hannover Messe with a brilliant success: At the opening of the world's leading trade show by Germany's Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel, Prof. Dr. Johanna Wanka presented the innovative family-owned company with the Hermes Award 2017, one of the world's most prestigious technology prizes. On her tour of the exhibition on Monday, Chancellor Merkel visited the SCHUNK booth, and looked on while the Managing Partner/CEO of the family-owned company, Henrik A. Schunk, presented smart gripping modules that enable direct human/robot collaboration (HRC). With its HRC grippers of the SCHUNK Co-act series the Swabian technology forge has made an important contribution to production systems of the future.

The company received the Hermes Award for the SCHUNK JL1 Co-act Gripper, the world's first intelligent gripping module for human/robot collaboration that directly interacts and communicates with humans. Henrik A. Schunk sees the award as a milestone in the history of the group of companies: "My team and I are proud of the success of the SCHUNK JL1 Co-act Gripper, which is a decisive step on the way to highly flexible handling scenarios for In-dustry 4.0 and therefore for smart production." For the first time in the history of the Hermes Award, the prestigious trophy was awarded for a gripping module. The award was given at the recommendation of an independent jury headed by Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster, Chairman of the Management Board of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). In 2015, SCHUNK had made it among the top five for the Hermes Award, and therefore was at the leading edge of technological innovation, back then with SCHUNK eGRIP, a web-based 3D design tool for additively manufactured gripper fingers.

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