KUKA Innovation Award 2020 | Medical Robotics Challenge

This year, it's back again!
KUKA Innovation Award 2020 - Call for Participation
Medical Robotics Challenge

As a world-leader in robot-based automation, KUKA has maintained an intense collaboration with academia and R&D partners worldwide on various scientific and technical topics for many years. To take this collaboration to the next level the KUKA Innovation Award has been established in 2014. It comes with a substantial financial prize of €20,000. The competition leading to the award is intended to accelerate the pace of innovation in the field of robot-based automation at large and improve technology transfers from research to industry.

The KUKA Innovation Award 2020 primarily targets the interaction of robotic systems with humans in the medical application field. This includes applications with direct interaction with a patient for diagnosis, rehabilitation, surgery and other forms of therapy. Using a robotic system, we would like to encourage participants to improve our ability to monitor health and to prevent, detect, treat and manage disease and to test and demonstrate new models and tools for health and care delivery. In addition, we are targeting patient and elderly care and supporting activities such as handling and logistics in a hospital workflow. Applicants for the Innovation Award are invited to select use cases where robots nowadays face serious challenges in interacting with their real-world environment including humn-robot collaboration. The proposed solutions are expected to enable newrobotic use cases for the future of healthcare. The solutions should address a valid clinical or medical problem in healthcare that can be solved with an innovative robotic solution. The clear focus of the KUKA Innovation Award Medical Robotics Challenge lies on the introduction and demonstration of new and innovative interactive methods forpersonalizing and improving health and care. The system concept should be versatile, i.e. broadly applicable, maybe even outside the medical field, and definitely not limited to an engineering approach for solving a specific use case. Participants from academia, research and industry are encouraged to present system concepts that can lead to, or are already on the edge to, commercialization.
Participating in the KUKA Innovation AwardThe competition is open to the robotics research community at large (including companies). This includes researchers and developers at a post-graduate level or higher as well as research teams. Individuals and teams must belong to a legal entity that enters into an agreement with KUKA for the purpose of the competition.

Read the whole guide here.