Automated Billing System using RFID and Cloud

The hassle of queues in shops, human errors in manually generated bills and the wastage of time in the packaging of products after shopping creates inconvenience to shoppers and eventually leads to lower customer satisfaction levels. This paper discusses the design of a shopping system where the customers drop products into a trolley which has an RFID reader to scan the RFID tags associated with products. After completion of shopping, customers can exit the shop with their bills deducted automatically from their e-Wallet. RFID technology has been incorporated with IR sensors to be able to accurately detect and determine whether a product has entered the cart or not. A Django Web Application is hosted on an AWS EC2 instance to allow customers to keep track of their transactions. The RFID system is connected to a Raspberry Pi with inbuilt Wi-Fi to communicate with an Amazon RDS MySQL instance which stores the inventory of the retail store along with the prices of the products. It also stores the current items in the cart and the history of previous transactions of every customer. An elaborate discussion of the existing system, the architecture of the implemented system, and results has been included in this paper. A future design using a ring-based RFID reader to cover the entire cart and ensure that any RFID tag within the region is scanned has been discussed. This design is integrated with a weight mat as an additional validation mechanism.