Agent based simulation with data driven parameterization for evaluation of social acceptance of a geothermal development: a case study in Tsuchiyu, Fukushima, Japan.

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.

Unified Approach to the Motion Design for a Snake Robot Negotiating Complicated Pipe Structures.

A unified method for designing the motion of a snake robot negotiating complicated pipe structures is presented. Such robots moving inside pipes must deal with various "obstacles," such as junctions, bends, diameter changes, shears, and blockages. To surmount these obstacles, we propose a method that enables the robot to adapt to multiple pipe structures in a unified way. This method also applies to motion that is necessary to pass between the inside and the outside of a pipe. We designed the target form of the snake robot using two helices connected by an arbitrary shape. This method can be applied to various obstacles by designing a part of the target form specifically for given obstacles. The robot negotiates obstacles under shift control by employing a rolling motion. Considering the slip between the robot and the pipe, the model expands the method to cover cases where two helices have different properties. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in various experiments.