Smart Shopping Trolley for Super Markets
In the modern world, every supermarket employee shopping baskets and shopping trolleys in order to aid customers to select and store the products which they intend to purchase. The customers have to drop every product which they wish to purchase into the shopping cart and then proceed to checkout at
2025-06-28 16:29:24 - Adil Khan
Smart Shopping Trolley for Super Markets
Project Area of Specialization Internet of ThingsProject SummaryIn the modern world, every supermarket employee shopping baskets and shopping trolleys in order to aid customers to select and store the products which they intend to purchase. The customers have to drop every product which they wish to purchase into the shopping cart and then proceed to checkout at the billing counter. The billing process is quite highly time consuming. Customers have absolutely no time to wait in long lines to do their jobs.
The Smart Trolley idea is based on the most popular automated self-checkout system in most of retail stores. The concept is to design a smaller version of the automated self-checkout system on a shopping trolley with a user interface screen which allows customers to make payment for items scanned and placed in the trolley before leaving the entrance of the store. This is to release pressure at the tills during peak hours. The Smart Trolley comes with all the traditional services including scanning an item to check for price and details. The Smart Trolley will also have other additional features that will be included in the design such as locating an item in the store by typing in the item’s name in the search field on the user interface screen which will automatically show the item’s location in the store.
The proposed system aims to eliminate all the inconveniences as possible from the systems and to make a system, which is consumer kindly, customer-friendly and high performing. The system’s aim would be consumer convenience and an overall time efficiency and high performance. This goal could be achieved by using the BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) system implemented using RFID technology.
The trolleys in the shopping centers are a protocol so that they can verify the items placed in them automatically and the last bill is forwarded to a web application, available on any phone or handheld computer. The system is also subject to anti-theft management, where the system allows no customer to take unchecked products.
Taking into account the changing trend in retail shopping the Smart Trolley is most certainly a definite necessity for the Retail marketing industry to step up their portfolios cope up with the advancement in technology and save time and manpower. The main motivation behind this project idea is to JUMP the long payment queue in shopping malls. The effect of multiple users operating at the same time, as well as any spectrum coexistence issues must be studied. The current implementation also does not talk about the placement of repeaters inside a supermarket layout.
Project Objectives- The main objective of smart trolley is to provide a technology oriented, low-cost, easily scalable, and rugged system for assisting shopping in person.
- Helps in business promotions for the super markets by gaining more customers providing quick service.
- It will provide effortless user-experience to the customers.
- The system is also subject to antitheft management, where the system allows no customer to take unchecked products.
The various components that are used in the implementation along with the important considerations are explained in details.
1) Barcode Scanner: The prototype uses a camera-based barcode scanner for implementation, which uses a small video camera to capture an image of the barcode and then use sophisticated Image Processing techniques to decode the barcode. We have used a RasberryPie CAM for this purpose, which is supposed to be fixed at the top, facing the slab attached to the cart. The ZBar barcode reader is used for the implementation. It also has a user interface that is displayed on the monitor in which the customer can see the green lines along the barcode if it has been detected correctly or a red light if it has not been detected.
2) Weight Sensor: A load-cell is configured as a weight sensor. The load cell CZL601-3kg has been used for the experiment, where 3kg denotes the Rated Capacity of the load cell. The cost of the load-cell depends on its precision; higher the precision, higher the price. The load cell is supplied with a DC voltage of 9 Volts with the help of a Transistor battery. Rated capacity is the maximum axial load that the load cell is designed to measure within its specifications.
3) Image Comparison algorithm: The Image comparison algorithm that is chosen for the design is the SIFT algorithm. It extracts interesting points on the object in the image to provide a feature description of the object. These features extracted from the training image are then used to identify the object when attempting to locate this object in a test image containing many other objects as well. The algorithm works well for all lighting conditions except for very extreme lighting condition.
4) Sensor mote at the Smart Cart: All the Smart Carts are equipped with a Crossbow IRIS-XM21mote running TinyOS Operating System, along with a MDA100CB sensor board [13]. The mote is connected to the system which is present at the cart via USB cable for monitoring and display purposes. The system at the cart is programed to calculate the weight two seconds after the product is being sensed by the load cell so that even if the product is dropped with a great force into the cart, it does not estimate a wrong weight based on the initial momentary thrust on the load-cell.
5) The Main Station: The Main Station resides at the counter meant for payment for bills. A PC with an IRIS sensor mote is used to communicate with the Shopping Carts. The database which contains the information of all the products that are present in the store, resides in the PC. MySql database has been used for the implementation. The PC also supports a GUI meant to assist the customers to pay their bill amounts and to alert the attendant in cases of discrepancy.
Benefits of the Project- This system helps in achieving a faster billing system.
- It helps buyer to know the bill details in advance so that they can plan accordingly in affordable prices.
- Intimates about the current offers present by showing a pop-up in trolley screen.
- Easy to use and does not need any special training. Introduction of artificial intelligence increases profit for sellers.
- Smart trolley interface is user friendly.
- The benefit of smart trolley provide shopping much easy, flexible and time saving.
The idea behind our designed features is explained in the next two sub-sections.
A. Features of the Smart Shopping Cart
1) The basic function of calculating and updating customers’ bill as and when he/she places the shopped products in the cart.
2) The customer can also track the details of the purchased items as well as the current bill amount on the monitor that is attached to the cart.
3) In addition to the above features, it also includes the handling of the following special cases, which ensures that the system is fair in all respects. All the cases mentioned below are detected by the system.
a) Attempt to take away products by keeping them into the cart without scanning their barcodes.
b) When the customer scans a product, but forgets to keep it in the cart.
c) Attempt to scan one product, but place multiple products in the cart.
d) Attempt to take away one product of higher price by scanning the barcode of another product of lesser price.
e) Since consumers are likely to change their mind, our implementation allows for removing any item already placed in the cart, without help from attendant.
B. The Design Idea
As the goal the first requirement is to have a barcode scanner attached to every shopping cart. this design includes a camera-based barcode scanner, which is fitted to the cart. The barcode scanner is required to identify a product so that its price can be determined from the database, which stores all the relevant information about all the products. The database in our design is stored in the Main Station, which is located at the payment counter.
C. Operation of the Smart Shopping System
A customer enters the Smart Shopping Centre. On entering, he/she first picks a Smart Shopping Trolley. Each trolley is given a unique ID and every customer is associated with the ID of the trolley chosen.
? When the customer picks up a product that he wishes to purchase, she/he first scans the barcode of the product using the barcode scanner and then places it on the slab of the cart, which is meant to play the role of putting the products into the cart when it is triggered to do so
? At the Main Station, this transmitted information is received by the sensor mote attached to it. This information is then used to fetch relevant information about the product from the database corresponding to the barcode.
? At the cart, the slab still holds the product and another picture of the product is taken just before the slab lets the product into the trolley .
? At the Main Station, the weight which is received from this cart is compared with the weight that was retrieved earlier from the database corresponding to the same cart ID.
Final Deliverable of the Project HW/SW integrated systemCore Industry ITOther Industries Others Core Technology Internet of Things (IoT)Other Technologies Internet of Things (IoT)Sustainable Development Goals Industry, Innovation and InfrastructureRequired Resources| Item Name | Type | No. of Units | Per Unit Cost (in Rs) | Total (in Rs) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total in (Rs) | 78900 | |||
| Bar Code Reader | Equipment | 1 | 8900 | 8900 |
| ESP-32 | Equipment | 3 | 600 | 1800 |
| Rotatory motor | Equipment | 2 | 200 | 400 |
| Raspberry pie 4B | Equipment | 1 | 20000 | 20000 |
| jumper wires/ bread board | Equipment | 1 | 900 | 900 |
| Raspberry pie camera | Equipment | 1 | 6000 | 6000 |
| Power Supplies | Equipment | 1 | 1000 | 1000 |
| Nextion Touch Display | Equipment | 1 | 7000 | 7000 |
| Trolley Structure | Equipment | 1 | 10000 | 10000 |
| UHF RFID Reader | Equipment | 1 | 7000 | 7000 |
| Arduino boards | Equipment | 1 | 1200 | 1200 |
| LOAD cells | Equipment | 1 | 700 | 700 |
| Bread Board | Equipment | 1 | 500 | 500 |
| soldering station | Equipment | 1 | 3500 | 3500 |
| Traveling | Miscellaneous | 1 | 2000 | 2000 |
| paper copying | Miscellaneous | 1 | 5000 | 5000 |
| penfalex printing | Miscellaneous | 1 | 3000 | 3000 |