Innovation

2016 New Equipment Digest Innovation Award Winners

May 6, 2016

After tallying thousands of votes and comments gathered from three months of voting, we are proud to announce 11 clear winners to the inaugural NED Innovation Awards, covering range of technologies and equipment that does our magazine proud.

Travis M. Hessman

The Votes Are In!

Five months ago, the New Equipment Digest editors sorted through a year's worth of equipment, perusing over 2,000 new tools, machines, software, and devices to find 20 examples of true, game-changing innovation.

To us, these 20 finalists for our inaugural NED Innovation Award represented the highest level of pure innovative disruption—they were engineered to create new markets, they promised to unlock new capabilities and fundamentally change their industries.

After that, we put the final decision up to you. We invited readers and experts in these fields to vote for your choice of the tools you believe may actually fulfill these disruptive promises. Your choice of the gear that will actually improve or change your jobs.

You did not disappoint.

After tallying thousands of votes and comments gathered from three months of voting, we are proud to announce 11 very clear winners for this contest, covering range of technologies and equipment that does our magazine proud.

So with that, it gives us great pleasure to announce the first class of NED Innovation Award winners:

Industryweek Com Sites Industryweek com Files Uploads 2016 03 Yumi Abb

YuMi Dual-Armed Collaborative Robot/ ABB Robotics. One for the first truly collaborative two-armed industrial robots, YuMi meets the flexible and agile production needs of the consumer electronics industry, even in small part assembly environments, and helps bridge the gap between humans and machines by allowing them to work side by side without safety barriers. A bold and brave new frontier.

Industryweek Com Sites Industryweek com Files Uploads 2016 03 Artec Spider Scan

Space Spider Handheld 3D Scanner/ Artec 3D . Inspired by the space industry, the Space Spider provides high quality, high resolution digital 3D models of physical objects with the wave of a hand. This technology allows us to digitize anything, and makes it easier for us to understand and manipulate the world around us. It has been used by doctors to construct implants and anthropologists to reconstruct a Homo Erectus skull.

Industryweek Com Sites Industryweek com Files Uploads 2016 03 Otto1500

OTTO 1500 Self-Driving Robot/ Clearpath Robotics. Built by a startup of very brilliant – and very young – engineers out of Canada, OTTO brings intelligent heavy-load transport to congested industrial operations without the need of external infrastructure for navigation. Using the same underlying self-driving technology at work in Google’s self-driving car, the system can transport 3,300-lb loads up to 4.5 mph while tracking optimal paths and avoiding collisions.

See the rest on New Equipment Digest!

New Equipment Digest is an IndustryWeek companion site within Penton's Manufacturing & Supply Chain Group.

About the Author

Travis M. Hessman | Editor-in-Chief

Travis Hessman is the editor-in-chief and senior content director for IndustryWeek and New Equipment Digest. He began his career as an intern at IndustryWeek in 2001 and later served as IW's technology and innovation editor. Today, he combines his experience as an educator, a writer, and a journalist to help address some of the most significant challenges in the manufacturing industry, with a particular focus on leadership, training, and the technologies of smart manufacturing.