We introduce document retrieval and comment generation tasks for automating horizon scanning. This is an important task in the field of futurology that collects sufficient information for predicting drastic societal changes in the mid- or long-term future. The steps used are: 1) retrieving news articles that imply drastic changes, and 2) writing subjective comments on each article for others’ ease of understanding. As a first step in automating these tasks, we create a dataset that contains 2,266 manually collected news articles with comments written by experts. We analyze the collected documents and comments regarding characteristic words, the distance to general articles, and contents in the comments. Furthermore, we compare several methods for automating horizon scanning. Our experiments show that 1) manually collected articles are different from general articles regarding the words used and semantic distances, 2) the contents in the comment can be classified into several categories, and 3) a supervised model trained on our dataset achieves a better performance. The contributions are: 1) we propose document retrieval and comment generation tasks for horizon scanning, 2) create and analyze a new dataset, and 3) report the performance of several models and show that comment generation tasks are challenging.

In this paper, we develop a prototype of a new snake-like robot using the screw drive mechanism, and design a control system design for trajectory tracking. First, we explain the outline of the snake-like robot using the screw drive units and joint units, as well as the principle of the screw drive mechanism. Next, in order to achieve the trajectory tracking of the robot, we derive a kinematic model. Finally, the validity of the derived model and the effectiveness of the proposed control system are demonstrated by simulations and experiments.

To search victims in the narrow space at the disaster site, we have developed the snake-like rescue robot called "KOHGA". The robot is constructed by connecting multiple crawler vehicles serially by active joints. KOHGA has a problem that obstacles are caught to the joints and then the robot is stuck. To solve this problem, we developed an unit assembled robot "KOHGA2". It can be rearranged. The robot can swing crawler-arms and avoid the stuck. In this paper, we report the construction of the hardware and the control system of KOHGA2, the basic mobility performance, and the stuck avoidance strategy.

In this paper we report the development of a new rescue robot platform. The robot is constructed by connecting multiple crawler vehicles serially, resulting a long and thin structure so that it can enter narrow space. The units are connected by 2-DOF active joints and 3-DOF passive joints, so that the robot can have both the capability to climb over obstacles as well as adaptation to irregular surfaces. Basic steering and experiments for the robot are also shown.

Robots are useful for search and detection missions for trapped victims after disasters due to their abilities enter places where human rescuers cannot go without risking their own lives. We have experienced and found much knowledge about rescue robots while participating in the RoboCup Rescue Competitions. In this paper we introduce examples of "effective multiple robot cooperative activities" and "a study of the number of robots and operators in a multiple robot team" from our experiences in these competitions.