For Heinz Martin Esser, Managing Director of Roth & Rau – Ortner, the award is confirmation of his previous work. “Our experts continuously research improvement potentials in factory automation and develop innovative products to this end”, Esser says. “We are very proud to have won such an important award. It encourages us to further advance the development of customtailored automation solutions for semiconductor factories and other near clean room production environments; and to set standards for the factory of the future.”

The mobile and freely-navigating clean room robot system SCOUT provides the flexible automated transport of materials in semiconductor factories and other clean production environments. In addition to the transport of objects, the active SCOUT system loads and unloads materials autonomously. The system significantly increases a factory’s efficiency, since employees can fully focus on the manufacturing process. Thus, production cost can be lowered considerably.

The development of the mobile and freely navigating robot system SCOUT was funded under the cooperate research project Cool Silicon by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Within the joint project EPT300 it was also supported by subsidies of the BMBF and the European Nanoelectronics Initiative Advisory Council (ENIAC).