Solution Architecture
The overall product comprises of 3 major sections and the following diagram depicts how they are connected.
When designing the smart shopping cart, attention was paid to following aspects.
Customer's convenience
Reliable monitoring of the customer
1) For Customer's convenience:
The procedure the customer has to follow is not much deviated from the traditional method used in super-markets.
If customer forgets to scan it, he would be reminded (with the use of an alarm)
Multiple payment methods
2) Reliable monitoring of the customer:
The following situations are handled using a combination of weight sensors and laser sensors.
- customer add/remove the item to the cart without scanning: Laser interrupted & weight in the cart does not match the calculated weight in the bill
- customer scanned the item ,but not added to the cart : Laser interrupted & weight in the cart does not match the calculated weight in the bill
Two way monitoring system (laser and weight) therefore increases the accuracy of the shopping process.
The process taking place during the shopping process is as follows.
Before adding item/s to the cart, the shopper should scan the item's barcode with the cart's barcode scanner . Then the details of the product are retrieved from the database.
Then, as the shopper enters the amount to be bought (using the carts lcd screen), the bill will be calculated. At this point, the actual weight of the items read using the weight sensor will be compared with the calculated new weight.
If there's a mismatch, the alarm notifies the shopper to recheck the bill entry. The system keeps record of the state of the cart to be faulty until the shopper corrects the error.
Each of the carts has unique Ids(uses rfid) and the rfid detectors at the exit would detect the carts with billing errors or unpaid bills.