Development of Cable Reel for Spherical Trailer – Uniform Cable Winding

Cabled communication is considered useful for rescue robots in post-disaster environments because the cable provides good signal communication and assists in retrieving the robot. Having said that, however, the cable could also hinder robot mobility and smaller robots lack payload capacity for reels. The spherical trailer cable reel we developed consists of a spherical trailer and a cable reel with a cable oscillator to oscillate the cable over the reel. Through experiments and studies, we identified a problem with the cable oscillator that prevented the cable from being wound uniformly over the reel. We propose three improvements to solve this problem involving optimization of the spatial cam structure. This paper describes the cable reel, improved mechanisms, and experiments to test their performances.