Automation of Shopping Carts using Technology

The advancements and developments in the field of innovative and creative thinking have played a pivotal role in kick-starting a whole new phase of technology - Internet of Things (IoT). A lot of research is being done in the line of robotics and artificial intelligence, all of which has helped us think of a very effective and economical means of reducing manual labor in our day to day activities. We found our inspiration in a supermarket. Moving shopping carts manually can sometimes become too tedious to control, especially for the elderly and physically disabled. The objective of our work was to solve a major problem of existing shopping carts, which is that they rely on manual labor to move. Our cart uses the principles of image processing to map itself to one particular user using a pattern tag and follows the user based on single object tracking and the distance sensed by ultrasonic sensors interfaced with a Raspberry Pi.