A barrel cam is used as a very important part of an index drive unit. The index drive unit must have an intermittent-rotational motion. The barrel typed cam and roller gear mechanism has the advantages of high reliability to perform a prescribed motion of a follower. This paper proposes a new method for the shape design of the barrel cam and also a CAD program is developed by using the proposed method. As defined in this paper, the relative velocity method for the shape design calculates the relative velocity of the follower versus cam at a center of roller, and then determines a contact point by using the geometric relationships and the kinematic constraints, where the direction of the relative velocity must be parallel to a common tangential line at the contact point of two independent bodies, i.e. the cam and the follower Then, the shape of the cam is defined by the coordinate transformation of the trace of the contact points. This paper presents two examples for the shape design of the barrel cam in order to prove the accuracy of the proposed methods.