Underfloor insulation, installed by a robot
SUMMARY
Mathew Holloway: CEO of Q-Bot and co-Founder of Artica
Mathew Holloway graduated from the University of Bath with 1st class Honours in Innovation and Engineering Design (MEng) in 2003 and completed a joint Masters (MSc and MA) in Innovation Design Engineering at Imperial College and the RCA in 2008.
Mathew is co-founder of two successful start-ups, as well as being an employee and advisor to a number of others. Artica used a phase change material to create a low energy, low-cost air conditioning/cooling system that could be easily retrofitted into existing buildings. The company grew rapidly and was subsequently sold to a Danish company where it was marketed in the UK as Cool-Phase.
Following this success, he joined the team at Q-Bot in 2013 to apply his design and engineering skills to fulfil his ambition of creating societal and environmental impact at scale. Q-Bot uses robotic technology, to crawl under floors and between walls, and is capable of buildings without the disruption of existing methods and techniques. This makes them far more affordable to heat, as well as helping them meet government targets for energy efficiency and CO2 emissions.
Mathew Holloway
CEO of Q-Bot and co-Founder of Artica
As Mathew explains, "Q-Bot was established to use technology to address the opportunity that we could see in the built environment. Advances in robotics and AI meant processes, that in some cases hadn't changed in hundreds of years, could now be done quicker, safer and to a much higher quality. Using robots to install underfloor insulation was the starting point on this journey."
Applying Empathetic Engineering Principles
Q-Bot demonstrates the importance of deep research into the issues of reducing energy usage of housing, especially where there is a substantial existing housing stock and where a solution needs to be retrofitted. Focus is vital to understanding where to intervene in a system and while it is relatively easy to insulate the rooves roofs of older properties, identifying heat loss through floors and walls and the relatively inaccessible spaces in older properties demands deep insight and exploration of the problem and thoughtful framing. Ideating a solution involves using “parallel worlds” to consider in this case robotics and AI might be applied, and then taking this technology and combining it with AI, smart sensors and actuators to create a technological system capable of addressing the problem and delivering a product, service system that can be deployed effectively. This in turn required careful mapping of the current experience and defining a new journey map that would deliver the solution that would satisfy a wide array of different stakeholders – home owners, landlords, developers, regulators, installers, constructors. Despite the deep technical knowledge required to solve this challenge, the starting point and driver for the solution was people. Both to understand what home owners wanted and how the disruption of traditional methods put them off, as well as understanding construction workers needs to create a solution they could pick up and use readily.
