I know it’s a bit of a cliche talking about how hard it was to select the winners of a challenge like this one, but that’s because it’s true. The quality, innovation and effort that’s gone into these amazing projects is way beyond any of our expectations, which is why it’s taken us longer than anticipated to select a top three.
We’ve been deliberating with a panel of Axelera AI judges and even put it out to the entire company to help us refine the selection - it’s been that close! So if your name’s not in the top three, rest assured you were within a hair’s breadth of being there.
Before we dive into the full roundup, please join me in congratulating the winners…
🥇 1st Place — €1,000
Elderly Safety Guardian, by
A real-world solution to a real-world challenge: detecting falls and alerting carers without false positives.
Judges were hugely impressed by the clarity of the use case, the low-cost, real-world deployability, and especially the thoughtful use of pose estimation to avoid false alarms. One of our judges commented: “It doesn’t just work. It’s built in a way that could actually be trialled tomorrow.”
🥈 2nd Place — €500
Sauron – The Intelligent Gimbal, by
An ambitious marine surveillance system that combines AI vision, object detection, and custom mechanical hardware.
Judges praised the mechanical design, depth of documentation, and complexity of the system, especially given the hardware constraints. “A very impressive multidisciplinary project with real potential for remote monitoring,” was one of many comments on this great project.
🥉 3rd Place — €500
ANPR For All, by
A drop-in licence plate recognition engine that could scale to real-world gate, fleet, and security systems.
A standout for its completeness, clarity, and real-world relevance. “A super polished project with strong storytelling and great technical depth. This could go commercial!” said one of our judges.
🌟 Honourable Mentions & Community Highlights
We want to take a moment to spotlight every completed project. Each one brought something unique, and the feedback from judges reflected genuine admiration for the creativity, effort and potential behind each submission.
It’s worth remembering that the people who were judging this challenge are working with, and building, AI projects, pipelines, promotions and products all day, every day. They’re the people who are building Axelera AI, so when they say they’re incredibly impressed by the quality of these projects, it’s coming from people who are supremely qualified to say that!
🧠
BroBot: AI-Powered Gym Companion, by @llrds
Real-time pose feedback and training insights for solo workouts.
Judges loved the concept of turning AI vision into a training partner with safety, form-checking, and even motivational feedback. “The symmetry check is genius.” Another noted the potential for gamification and fun interaction to motivate users. This one genuinely feels like it has legs (and abs!).
🐾
Summer Sidekick, by @mcunha
An AI-powered pet and plant sitter, because automation should include the ones you care about.
A technically ambitious project with tons of potential. Judges highlighted the impressive hardware integrations, training of custom vision models, and creative automation setup. “It’s the kind of project I’d genuinely use at home.”
🧏
See and Hear, by @skroedel
A smart microphone that visually tracks who’s speaking. Perfect for hybrid calls and assistive tech.
Judges were intrigued by the novel combination of vision and audio. While the use case needed a clearer pitch, the integration across modalities was highly appreciated. “Nice to see audio incorporated into an AI vision pipeline,” noted one.
🤖
Autonomous Welding Cobot, by @aly.elghanam
An industrial robot with a vision-based safety kill switch—because automation should never compromise safety.
“This is what AI at the edge should look like. Multi-disciplinary, safety-first, and practical.” Judges highlighted the clever application of object detection to protect human operators, and praised its extensibility into broader manufacturing tasks with literally thousands of applications.
💬 Final Words
To everyone who submitted a project, shared updates, asked questions, or helped others: you’ve shown exactly what this community is all about. Whether you took home a prize or not, you created something impressive, meaningful, and shareable. And for that, we can’t thank you enough.
Stay tuned too, as we’re planning a lot more project challenges and other activities for all you awesome Axelerators out there to show us what the future of AI is really going to look like!
Until next time, keep building, keep sharing, and keep recognising and reacting!