The American-Made Buildings Prize: Envelope Retrofit Opportunities for Building Optimization Technologies (E-ROBOT) is designed to catalyze the development of minimally invasive, low-cost, and holistic building envelope retrofit solutions that make retrofits easier, faster, safer, and more accessible for workers.
Awards:-
Total Cash Prize Pool
$4 million in cash prizes for competitors and an additional $1 million in awards and support to Network partners.
Prize Breakdown
The E-ROBOT Prize is designed to catalyze the development of minimally invasive, low-cost, and holistic building envelope retrofit solutions that make retrofits easier, faster, safer, and more accessible for workers. It offers $4 million in cash prizes for competitors and an additional $1 million in recognition awards and support for the American-Made Network Connectors in the American-Made Network.
Phase 1 – Concept and Design: In this phase, teams are expected to present an innovative idea that solves a known industry problem for building envelope retrofits. This phase focuses on proving that the solution solves a critical building envelope need, developing a concept and design, and forming a team capable of achieving success. Up to 10 Phase 1 winners will win $200,000 in cash prizes and will then be eligible to compete in Phase 2.
Phase 2 – Build and Validate: In Phase 2, winning competitors from Phase 1 will take their individual components add the other required functionality to create a holistic, and “turnkey,” integrated product offering. In Phase 2, up to four winners will win $500,000 in cash prizes.
The overarching goal of E-ROBOT is to catalyze the development of minimally invasive, low-cost, and holistic building envelope retrofit solutions that make retrofits easier, faster, safer, and more accessible for workers. Successful competitors will provide solutions that provide significant advancements in robot technologies that will advance the energy efficiency retrofit industry and develop building envelope retrofit technologies that meet the following criteria:
- Holistic: The solution must include mapping, retrofit, sensing, and inspection.
- Low cost: The solution should reduce costs significantly when compared to current state-of-the-art solutions. The target for reduction in costs should be based on a 50% reduction from the baseline costs of a fully implemented solution (not just hardware, software, or labor; the complete fully implemented solution must be considered). If costs are not at the 50% level, there should be a significant energy efficiency gain achieved.
- Minimally invasive: The solution must not require building occupants to vacate the premises or require envelope teardown or significant envelope damage.
- Utilizes long-lasting materials: Retrofit is done with safe, nonhazardous, and durable (30+ year lifespan) materials.
- Completes time-efficient, high-quality installations: The results of the retrofit must meet common industry quality standards and be completed in a reasonable timeframe.
- Provides opportunities to workers: The solution enables a net positive gain in terms of the workforce by bringing high tech jobs to the industry, improving worker safety, enabling workers to be more efficient with their time, improving envelope accessibility for workers, and/or opening up new business opportunities or markets.
Awards:- $4,000,000
Deadline:- 12-05-2021
