euRobotics Awards Winners – European Robotics Forum 2025

– 26 March 2025 –

1.) The Georges Giralt PhD Award 

The Georges Giralt PhD Award is a long-established European scientific prize for extraordinary contributions in robotics. Out of more than 50 applications, the following four finalists were selected to pitch their PhD at ERF:  

Ignacio Cuiral-Zueco, Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain): Shape Control of Deformable Objects

David Hardman, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom): Multimodal Soft Sensor Design through Single-Material Information Structuring

Michele Pierallini, University of Pisa (Italy): Planning and Control for Soft Robots. Learning in model-based paradigm

Erfan Shahriari, Technical University of Munich (Germany): Passivity-Based Force/Motion Planning and Control for Tactile Manipulation

The winner of the 2025 Georges Giralt PhD Award is Erfan Shahriari

2.) The euRobotics Technology Transfer Award 

The Tech Transfer Award is the second of three long-established awards that follow an arc from the lab to the market. Out of a record number of 17 applications for this year’s Tech Transfer Award, the jury nominated the following four finalists:  

PREDIRE – Autonomous Sewer Network Inspection System.  Mehdi Boukallel (CEA-List), Damien Vautier (Sarp, VEOLIA Group), Jérôme Taufour (Sarp, VEOLIA Group)

olixSense – AI-Powered Inertial Measurement Unit for Advanced Robotics.  Dr. Edwin Babaian (Olive Robotics GmbH), Dr. Mojtaba Leox Karimi (Olive Robotics GmbH), Prof. Dr. Eckehard Steinbach (Technical University of Munich)

Cortex – A Physical AI Orchestration Model for Small Batch Manufacturing.  Suman Pal (Telekinesis GmbH), Arjun Datta (Telekinesis GmbH), Prof. Jan Peters (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Hammerhead – Enabling Precision Agriculture Through Autonomous Robots.  Andrea Sala (FieldRobotics Ltd.), Dario Mengoli (FieldRobotics Ltd.), Lorenzo Marconi (FieldRobotics Ltd.)

1st prize: Hammerhead – Enabling Precision Agriculture Through Autonomous Robots

2nd prize: PREDIRE – Autonomous Sewer Network Inspection System

3rd prize: olixSense – AI-Powered Inertial Measurement Unit for Advanced Robotics

Finalist: Cortex – A Physical AI Orchestration Model for Small Batch Manufacturing

3.) The 2025 Renaud Champion Entrepreneurship Award 

The euRobotics Renaud Champion Entrepreneurship Award is given each year to the most promising robotic start-up in Europe and is the third of the long-established euRobotics Awards. This year’s finalists are:  

XiniX AI (Belgium): soft robotics for confined space inspections

Enabling Robotics (Germany): assistive robotic manipulation

O-Robotics (Denmark): urban street cleaning

RobCo (Germany): smart modular robots

Simobotics (Bulgaria): collaborative and autonomous mobile robots

The winners of the 2025 Renaud Champion Entrepreneurship Award are:

3rd place: O-Robotics

2nd place: Xinix AI

1st place: RobCo

4.) The Scientific Track Best Paper Award 

The Scietific Track Best Paper Award is a more recent awardThere are two awards, one for best paper in robotics, the other for best paper in AI in robotics. There were ten short-listed nominees, five for each award.

The winners of the 2025 Scientific Track Best Paper Award are:

Robotics: Robin Strässer, Felix Brändle, David Meister, Marc Seidel, and Frank Allgöwer (University of Stuttgart Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control) for their paper: Autonomous E-Scooters for Sustainable Urban Mobility: Achievements and Insights from an Experimental Prototype.

AI in Robotics: Maximilian Mehl, Marco Tognon (Univ Rennes, CNRS, Inria, IRISA – UMR 6074, Rennes), Alberto Dalla Libera, Ruggero Carli (Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Padova) for their paper: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Robust End-to-End UAV Control from Simulation to Real System Application.

5.) Sustainability in Robotics Recognition 

This recognizes and celebrate innovations in robotics that contribute significantly to environmental, social and economic sustainability. Eight nominees have been recognized and of these, two have received a Travel Award from the UK Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA) to enable them to travel to ERF 2025, plus free access to ERF 2025, courtesy of euRobotics.

The recipients of the 2025 Sustainability in Robotics Recognition are:

three start-ups: