March 2019

Sevensense winner of the Tech Transfer Award 2019

The Sevensense project was the winner of the euRobotics Tech Transfer Award announced on March 21, 2019, at the European Robotics Forum in Bucharest.

The TechTransfer award aims at showcasing the impact of robotics research and at raising the profile of successful technology transfer between science and industry. It recognizes outstanding innovation in robot technology and automation that result from cooperative efforts between research and industry. An important criterion is also the impact created by the technology transfer, e.g. creating socioeconomic value or resulting in the establishment of a spin-off to commercially exploit the outcome. 

For the first time in the 15 years’ history of the prize, only one award was handed out - equal to a third place for the winner application.

Sevensense Robotics AG (https://sevensense.ch) is a company that spun-off from the research project financed by Wyss Zurich in September 2018. The company has been conceived as a vehicle to translate the research results of the Sevensense project, through the industrialization and further development of the technology, into a tangible commercial product.

Sevensense is committed to helping industries achieve new levels of efficiency and unlock novel
applications by pushing the frontiers of mobile robotics. Equipped with its technology, robots supposedly can safely and autonomously navigate in dynamic indoor and outdoor environments such as airports, supermarkets, warehouses and train stations. The Sevensense core technology is based on computer vision and AI techniques, more precisely it is a visual-inertial (VI) simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system, which allows for reliable and precise localization of robotic platforms in challenging and dynamic environments.

The team was represented by Dr. Gregory Hitz, Dr. Marcin Dymczyk and Gianluca Cesari, Co-Founders of Sevensense Robotics AG.

The other finalist that pitched for the award were:

• "Flexible Automation in High-Variant Electronics Production through Digital Planning of Advanced Hybrid Robot Systems" - a collaboration of the Institute for Factory Automation and Production Systems, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, & Siemens
• "Flexible HRI for heavy‐duty robots" by Fraunhofer IWU
• "Sweeper - A Sweet Pepper Harvesting Robot" represented by Stichting Wageningen Research