Abstract
A mobile mechanism using wheels is one of the most popular mechanisms for mobile robots. Because, its energy efficiency is high, mechanism is simple and the control system is well investigated. However, the wheel type mobile robots have difficulty in the rough terrain movement. In the previous research a 6-wheeled mobile robot employing the linkage mechanism, "Zaurus", has been developed to enhance maneuverability of wheel type robots. In this paper, we propose an environment recognition system that selects optimum controller for Zaurus in each environment. This system using the self-organizing map (SOM) is fed the linkage data because the Zaurus has linkage mechanism which changes the shape according to the environment.
