Smart Shopping Trolley based on IoT and AI for the Visually Impaired

A smart shopping trolley can help the visually impaired and blind customers to shop without the need of assistance. Shopping malls that provide such trolleys attract more customers. The smart shopping trolley proposed in this research emphasize on Artificial intelligence and is embedded with RFID technology. Tesseract optical character recognition algorithm extracts the name and cost of the product. The E-speak library reads the name and cost of the product to the visually impaired as an audio message. The smart trolley makes use of cameras, Ultrasonic (US) sensors, DC motor, Motor Drivers, interfaced with a Raspberry Pi to make the system work. An US sensor finds the distance of an obstacle, if any, in the person’s path and alerts the user frequently through an audio. This shopping trolley assists blind people making it easier for them to shop and indeed enjoy shopping. The system saves customer time thereby promoting business sales.