UK Innovators Making the Transport Industry Safe and Accessible

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Hausbot’s HB2 crawler. It’s a robot that can stick to and climb up any surface to inspect some of the most critical infrastructure like bridges, tunnels, even storage tanks.

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Pollution coming from brake dust and tire wear is very bad for humans. So we’ve developed a couple of solutions that retrofit to vehicles to capture brake dust at source.

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At wewalk, we took a standard white cane, chopped off the rubber handle and enhanced it with cutting edge upper body obstacle detection. Or what’s more, it’s got patented connectivity to our WeWalk smartphone app. HouseBots were part of the National Highways Graffiti challenge to get access to a real bridge to test on via the catapult process. And the case study that we got was a really key unlocking factor proving our technology’s capability in a real life environment. The Freight Innovation Fund helped us to support prototype production expensive testing equipment, allowing us to do about five weeks of testing on closed track trials.

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The future of Air Mobility program allowed us to implement and validate our Weiss system at Gatwick Airport to then get visually impaired people to catch flights. We created a robust evidence package which we’re now taking to other venue operators. To ensure that we can keep scaling up our organization. We were able to validate our concept, improve our solutions and go to the next step of road trials. Since completing the programs, HouseBots now employs eight people full time, two people part time.

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We’ve gone on to raise one and a half million pounds in venture capital funding and our revenues this year should exceed a million pounds. We’ve reached users in over 100 countries. We’ve been validated by awards such as the Time Best Invention. We’ve also reached several international airports, including the Tav Airport Group and international clothing brands such as LC Waikiki. We’ve got a goal to hit £2 million in revenue within the next three years.

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And exporting globally is a big part of our plans as well. Robots are going to become the thing for inspecting and maintaining the world’s critical infrastructure done much better and safer using technologies like ours. We want WeAssist to be available in new environments across the globe. We want our visually impaired community empowered by our WeWalk smart cane or our WeAssist system to be able to access new environments with complete confidence. We would love to get our product to market globally, scale it and be able to replicate this innovation.

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But across other sectors, I can highly recommend the catapult programs. It really helped HouseBots and my business. It got the customers to see the product in its actual environment and we wouldn’t be here today without having had access to some of these things that catapult provided for us. The catapult has enabled us to explore environments that we haven’t explored before. It’s allowed us to conduct evidence, meet new people, develop long lasting relationships that will truly have a long term impact on our business forevermore and sa.