Emesent’s Hovermap Wins Australia’s Coveted Good Design Award for Design Excellence

The winners of Australia’s peak industry design awards – the highest honour for design and innovation in the country were announced at The Star on 11 July at the 61st annual Good Design Awards Ceremony.

Emesent’s Hovermap product received a prestigious Good Design Award Winner Accolade in the Product Design category in recognition for outstanding design and innovation.

The annual Good Design Awards is Australia’s most prestigious international awards for design and innovation with a proud history dating back to 1958. The Awards celebrate the best new products and services on the Australian market, excellence in architectural design, engineering, fashion, digital and communication design and reward emerging areas of design strategy, social impact and design entrepreneurship.

This year the Awards attracted a record number of submissions with close to 700 design projects evaluated by The Good Design Awards Jury. They spent several days evaluating each entry according to a strict set of design criteria which covers ‘good design’, ‘design innovation’ and ‘design impact’. Projects recognised with a Good Design Award must demonstrate excellence in all areas and convince the Jury they are worthy of recognition.  

Dr. Brandon Gien, CEO of Good Design Australia said: “Receiving a Good Design Award at this level is a significant achievement given the very high calibre of entries received this year.”

“Australia’s Good Design Award is more than a symbol of design excellence, it represents the hard work and dedication towards an innovative outcome that will ultimately improve our quality of life. These projects showcase the brilliance of design and the potential it has to improve our world,” said Dr. Gien.

The brief for Hovermap’s payload was to design an attachment for industrial drones that included a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor to allow autonomous flight in GPS-denied environments and 3D mapping using SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping).

Emesent engaged the multi award winning Design + Industry for the industrial design aspects of the Hovermap payload, entrusting them to deliver a solution that encompassed minimal weight, balance, thermal management of internal components and mechanical precision. Design + Industry were put to the challenge and produced a payload that was extremely lightweight (less than 2kg) yet robust enough to withstand the demands of challenging environments, such as underground mines.

The Good Design Awards Jury praised Emesent’s Hovermap commenting: “ This is a very good example of automation in an industrial context to reduce error, enhance safety and improve workflow / throughput. Nicely resolved industrial design and features with appropriate use of materials and finishes for the application including the use of carbon fiber for light weight, and a variety of install orientations.”

Nathan Burke, Head of Development at D+I said “The collaboration with Emesent has been fantastic. The Hovermap product is a great example of Australia’s future where design, engineering and manufacturing partners come together to create world beating products – a combination of high performance and leading-edge technology providing unique solutions to challenging problems in the infrastructure and mining environments.”

Stefan Hrabar, CEO of Emesent said: “We’re extremely proud to receive this award as it is a testament to the time and effort put in by our engineers. It was a pleasure working with the D+I team and they did a fantastic job of turning our design requirements into a great looking and functional product.”

Image: An underground scan of a mine stope using Hovermap

To find out more about Hovermap visit the Emesent website at emesent.kndtesting.com.au or email info@emesent.io.