For the fourth time, the editorial staff of the "handling" received their award, the "handling award", as part of the Motek 2017.

An independent jury of experts from the industry tested the applications and presented the winners on October 10 in Stuttgart. It honors outstanding innovations in the fields of handling and assembly, automation and robotics, quality and safety as well as storage, picking, handling and transport.

This year, JAKOB Antriebstechnik GmbH received the prize for the further developed Force Monitoring System (FMS) in "Quality and Safety". These are intelligent clamping claws, which reliably monitor the prevailing clamping forces even during processing by means of constant data transfer. This increases productivity, safety and processing quality in a wide variety of clamping situations. The clamping forces can be transmitted to a hand-held display device, a commercially available laptop or directly to the machine control. When a freely adjustable limit force is exceeded, the system can also send an emergency stop signal to the processing machine. It is also possible to log the data at regular intervals. The FMS is available in three versions. The "FMS JAW XXL" is versatile, the force measuring system is integrated into the clamping claw. The version "FMS JAW s", on the other hand, is a miniaturized variant using a special clamping jaw that can be mounted on a standardized clamping device instead of a standard jaw. The "FMS PAD", on the other hand, is mainly used for processing large parts. It is inserted between the clamping element and the workpiece.