Now, a shopping cart to make long cash counter queues a thing of the past

Bangalore, Jan.18 (ANI): Three engineering students in India's southern Bangalore city have created a self-check-out-counter-shopping-cart which will be used in grocery stores across the city. The cart's inbuilt automatic billing system makes shopping a breeze and has other positive spin-offs such as freeing staff from repetitive checkout scanning, reducing pilferage and increasing operational efficiency in stock taking.

The group of three engineering undergraduates are from Bangalore's PES Engineering College, and have designed a self-check out shopping cart to make long queues at cash counters a thing of the past.

Invented by Praveen Kumar, Roopa and Arjun, the Intelligent Shopping Cart is equipped with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for product identification and a consistent Wi-Fi connection with the shop's server.

Besides, it also has an LED display that informs customers about product prices, discounts, offers and the total bill.

"As soon as the object is dropped into or removed from the cart, the RFID tag identifies the product and updates the bill. When the customer is done with shopping, he can just press the 'end shopping' button and the details are sent to the shop's server and the customer has to pay just the amount and leave," said Pooja, the innovator.

The trio's presentation was the only one from India to be accepted at an international conference on the 'networked embedded systems for enterprise applications' in Freemantle.

Along with 18 other selected papers, it will be published in the form of a book.

"According to a survey we did, most of the people opt to leave the shopping mall instead of waiting in long queues to buy a few products," said Arjun.

He adds, "This shopping cart will change the way people shop as radically as ATM's changed banking."

According to the trio, their proposed cart is easy to use and does not need any special training. It uses four technologies-infrared sensors for dynamic location detection and tracking, RFID tags for product identification, 'zigbee' for wireless communication with the shop's server, and an integrating system with display for billing and inventory management. (ANI)