DART (Digital Automated Retrofit Toolset)

The $10 trillion construction industry currently relies on manual, labour-intensive processes, has falling productivity and is slow to adopt new technologies. It has been severely affected by the Covid-19 crisis and its low rate of technology adoption is likely[][0] to greatly hinder the post-pandemic recovery. The repair and upgrade of existing buildings is particularly challenging and can be broadly characterised as: * inefficient, relying on repetitive, manual, laborious processes; * highly variable and subject to individual expertise and interpretation; * depends on information that is rarely accessible, shared or disseminated; * failing to learn from past mistakes. The UK government has passed legislation to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050\. Many local authorities have declared a carbon emergency and set targets to reach net zero carbon emissions two decades sooner, by 2030\. However, the UK has some of the least efficient housing stock in Europe (Association for the Conservation of Energy, 2015) and energy use in homes accounts for approximately 14% of UK greenhouse gas emissions (Committee on Climate Change, 2019). An unprecedented effort will be needed to upgrade the UK's 28 million homes (Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, 2019) to modern standards in order to meet the challenge of climate change. The scale of the task and the necessary timescales mean that retrofits must be cost effectively delivered at volume and without sacrificing quality. Current practises are entirely inadequate when faced with the challenge of reducing climate change through whole-house retrofit, or managing the maintenance of the UK's 28 million homes. This project will rethink how buildings are surveyed, maintained and retrofitted by connecting the built environment with state of the art digital, surveying and AI technologies. Surveying buildings and the retrofit process, is currently laborious, bespoke, highly variable, reliant on individual expertise and interpretation, while lessons learned are rarely shared. In many cases surveys are still performed with pen and paper. When digital technology is employed it is often little more than a tablet version of pen and paper. Q-Bot will address this opportunity and bring the retrofit process into the 21st century by developing a unique solution that can survey a building, identify its needs, manage the risks inherent with the process, select and design the most cost-effective upgrade path, manage the specification, procurement and installation of energy efficiency measures to ensure the optimal retrofit solutions are selected and verify the installation and measure performance post-retrofit. [0]: #_msocom_1