Lufft Wins Innovation Award of BadenWuerttemberg

The measurement and control technology company Lufft was selected as one winner of the “Dr. Rudolf Eberle Prize” at “Haus der Wirtschaft” in Stuttgart. The award includes prize money of 10.000 Euros. With the innovation of its new mobile road sensor MARWIS, the company from Fellbach triumphed over a field of 77 competitors. Peter Hofelich, the state secretary of the Ministry of Finance in BadenWuerttemberg, presented the prize to Lufft managing directors Klaus Hirzel and Axel SchmitzHübsch. Since 1985, the Baden-Wuerttemberg innovation award has celebrated medium-sized companies in the region who have developed outstanding innovations in the fields of industry, trade, and technological services.

At the prize ceremony, Lufft manager Klaus Hirzel explained: “Being inaugurated into the line of exceptional and creative developers in this state with this award fills us all with pride. The MARWIS sensor is a result of exceptional engineering expertise and a business plan focused on innovation. In doing so, we followed our credo: global thinking, creative development, punctual and error-free availability.”

The innovative road sensor MARWIS impressed the 12 members of the expert jury, who are elected by the Ministry of Finance from the fields of business and technology. The mobile sensor was introduced in 2014 and is a road weather information sensor that detects road conditions and environmental data reliably. Installed on vehicles, MARWIS records data in real time and straight from the car.

Besides road surfaces (dry, humid, frozen, snow-capped and critically or chemically wet), the sensor records data such as road surface temperature, water film height, dew point temperature, ice percentage, friction, and humidity. In doing so, the sensor increases road safety, offers evidence in the case of traffic accidents, aids route planning, and enhances the efficiency of winter service.

The wholly Lufft owned subsidiary MICKS MSR GmbH which is specialiSed on meteorological all-in-one systems in the field of transport, is part of a leadingedge project of the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt). The order serves the research and development of a distance-based prediction of slippery roads and thus the advancement of the winter road maintenance. The data will also be incorporated into the journey time calculation of navigation systems in future. In the course of this, the award-winning MARWIS sensor goes into action for the qualification of the data models.