SMART-Smart Mobile Autonomous Robotic Trolley

Shopping malls and complex are increasing day by day and can see an enormous surge at these shopping centers on the siestas and ends of the weeks. Consumers buy different products and place them in trolley. After selecting all the products, one needs to go cashier counter for billing of the products. At the billing counter, the cashier prepares the bill by scanning the bar code of each product which is an exceptionally tedious process and results in a long queue at the billing counter. In this paper, a prototype of Smart Mobile Autonomous Robotic Trolley (SMART) is proposed for helping a consumer for shopping in terms of reduction in shopping time and analyzing the products in the view of total billing and expiry date. The primary aim of the proposed prototype is to reduce this tedious process, use minimal effort for shopping concept and reduce the time of both customers and salespeople. In the implemented system, ATmega 16 microcontroller is interfaced with EM18 RFID reader module, buzzer and LED indicator. Wireless data transfer between the trolley billing system and billing station system is achieved through XBee ZigBee S2D. The key aspects of the overall system consisting of the system architecture, trolley billing system, product detection system, trolley controlling system methodology, power supply. The system also implements an algorithm for shopping controlling system, trolley controlling system. The proposed prototype consists of two parts, the first part includes RFID based product detection, bill generation, wireless communication between shopping trolley with billing counter using ZigBee and second part consist of control motion of trolley using customer control which also includes obstacle detection. The detailed hardware-software implementation is discussed in this paper.