The TUM IdeAward honored the business ideas of Kewazo, Apicbeam, and Acrai. The three teams will receive a total of €37,500 in prize money from the Zeidler Research Foundation, as well as coaching sessions with TUM Startup Consulting and UnternehmerTUM.
A total of 33 teams applied for the current competition round. The winners are working on an intelligent transport elevator for the construction industry, a hologram-like display technology for digital communication, and an autonomous system for non-chemical weed removal in agriculture.
Idea Award for construction elevator, hologram and weed robot
First place goes to KewazoThe team has developed an intelligent transport system for the construction industry. It can be assembled by just two people and, by combining vertical and horizontal transport, enables a more consistent material flow than other methods. This allows hazardous logistics activities to be automated, assembly costs to be reduced, and assembly speed to be increased. The collected information also enables continuous monitoring and process optimization.
Apicbeam secures second place. The SCEA startup is developing a display technology that creates virtual images and videos floating freely in space. Unlike conventional technologies, the image information is not displayed on a two-dimensional surface, but rather encoded in a thin line of light using optical dispersion. The image appears to float in space like a hologram, is visible from all sides, and remains facing all viewers at all times.
Third place goes to Acrai with an artificial intelligence-based system for non-chemical weed control. The autonomous agricultural robots reliably distinguish crops from weeds at all growth stages and combine this with the automation of mechanical weed removal methods. This enables conventional agriculture to eliminate the need for herbicides and offers organic agriculture the prospect of fully automated mechanical weed control, which is said to be cheaper and more efficient than previous methods.
