Development of Smart Sensor Array Mat for Retail Inventory Management

Inventory management of retail market involve manual stock keeping process that is labour intensive and prompt to human error. Hence, results in mismatching of items with the inventory record and loss of sale up to 4%. Thus, there is a need to monitor the movement of the goods on the retail shelves. In this paper, we disclosed the fabrication of large piezo-resistive sensor mat, which is able to display the product base structure shape for tracking the stock inventory in retail store. Each square-shaped sensing pixel is of 5 mm in dimension with the sensing area of 4×4 mm². The detected shape of the product is displayed on the graphical user interface (GUI) using the PC. The fabricated sensor mat is characterized for functional resistance range of 10KΩ to 900KΩ with a 98mN resolution. The sensor mat has an uniformity error of 2.2%, and repeatability error of 3.1%. The longevity and durability of the sensor mat is validated for 7 days and through 1000 times drops test respectively. The proposed sensor mat is also demonstrated with five different products for shape detection.