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Snake robots have shown significant locomotion abilities in various challenging environments. Therefore, they are considered good candidates for search-and-rescue and inspection applications. Their expected working environment may cause the problem of actuator malfunction, which in turn leads to task failure. As actuator replacement or maintenance is not always possible in these difficult-to-reach environments, a control strategy that enables the robot to resume its motion (using the remaining actuators) is highly needed. In this paper, we introduce a shape-based recovery control approach for snake robots with joint failure. In the proposed method, the motion is recovered by restoring the overall desired shape of the robot via controlling the neighbor joints of the failed one. The controlled joints form a so-called recovery part which works to eliminate the effect caused by the failed joint. The recovery part restores the desired robot shape and thus allows the robot to carry on the desired motion. We derive recovery controllers considering locked-joint and free-joint failures. The approach is also extended to cover the double failure case, where two failed joints are considered during movement. The validity of the proposed method is verified in the simulation environment. We apply the recovery controller for several failure scenarios considering different locations of the failed joint. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed method to regain the robot shape and resume the locomotion desired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development of geothermal power plants and local geothermal energy initiatives have lagged due to the social problems such as conflicts with stakeholders such as Onsen (Hot Spa) owners, despite the abundant geothermal resources. Study area was Tsuchiyu Onsen in Fukushima prefecture, Tohoku (Northeast) District, Japan, where the Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Nuclear Accident occurred in 2011, and the reconstruction and local initiatives of geothermal energy were still unclear. Agent-based modeling is an effective methodology for modeling and analysis of opinion formation. Parameter estimation method was proposed to extract appropriate parameters from various factors through a Bayesian Network. The characteristics of stakeholders and communities that affected opinion formation in the survey area were successfully extracted. Here we show the sufficient methodology to quantify the characteristics of each person using survey data, and to extract the parameters of the agent by data-driven inverse analysis. By using this methodology, we could reproduce opinion diversity, which is a property of opinion formation in real communities. This result suggests that the model replicates the actual formation of opinion in Tsuchiyu, where the economy was boosted by the construction of a binary cycle power plant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]