Tension Tells the Tail: Cable-Obstacle Interaction Sensing for Tethered Mobile Robot Navigation

Overview & Synopsis

Tethered mobile robots can sustain long-duration operation through continuous power supply and stable communication via their cables. However, cable-environment interaction causes unintended obstacle displacement, cable snagging or entanglement, and even cable damage, leading to mission failure. To assess the risk of individual cable-obstacle contacts, this study investigates cable tension as a sensing modality for estimating whether a contacted obstacle is movable or non-movable. We conducted experiments with a tethered mobile robot and collected tension data while varying robot velocity, contact angle between the obstacle and cable, obstacle mass, and obstacle side-surface material. The results show that obstacle movability is characterized by the initial tension rise and, more importantly, by whether the tension relaxes or remains high after its peak. Based on these observations, we select six features from the tension profiles and train a logistic-regression classifier using 117 labeled trials. The proposed method distinguishes movable and non-movable cases with a balanced accuracy of 95.5% after 30 cm of post-contact travel. These results demonstrate the potential of cable tension for risk assessment of cable-obstacle interactions and provide a step toward online, cable-aware autonomous navigation.