The idea of intelligent shopping cart has been developed for years. Engineers have proposed plenty of models to make the shopping and payment process more convenient and smooth. However, most of the existing models cannot reach a appropriate balance between user experience and cost. Take the model designed by Raju Kumar[1] in 2013 as an example. The block diagram of their system is shown as below:
In this system, the product recognition is purely implemented by the usage of RFID. A key pad is needed because the system needs user input to determine whether the shopping process has started, whether the user want to check out, whether a product is being put in or taking out. Additionally, a LCD is used to display the billing information and these information is sent to center server through Zigbee and Wi-Fi.
The main drawback of this system is the unsatisfying user experience because of the tedious shopping process. Everytime user need to add or delete an item, he has to scan RFID, and choose add or delete on key pad. From our perspective, although the intelligent shopping cart designed by them has the potential to relief, it cannot provide a brand new convenient shopping experience that can distinguish itself from the traditional way of shopping based on normal shopping cart and cashiers.
There is another relatively much maturer smart shopping product on market, which is developed by a company called Caper[2]. Their currently deployed product is modern, functional, and beautiful.
The main drawback of this system is the unsatisfying user experience because of the tedious shopping process. Everytime user need to add or delete an item, he has to scan RFID, and choose add or delete on key pad. From our perspective, although the intelligent shopping cart designed by them has the potential to relief, it cannot provide a brand new convenient shopping experience that can distinguish itself from the traditional way of shopping based on normal shopping cart and cashiers.
There is another relatively much maturer smart shopping product on market, which is developed by a company called Caper[2]. Their currently deployed product is modern, functional, and beautiful.
The item recognition is implemented by bar code scanner, and users can directly check out on the screen after they have completed shopping. Despite of its gorgeous appearance, we believes that there is still space for improvement. Firstly, the item recognition could be more intuitive. The second issue, and also the main drawback of this device, it that the cost is too high because of the huge LCD screen. It also increase the difficulty of maintenance.