Self-Driving Smart Cart

Abstract

Smart shopping is a feature oriented project which solves some of the major difficulties which we face during shopping in supermarkets and hypermarkets. It eliminates the effort of the customer to push, steer and shop simultaneously. This project has successfully implemented a Self-driving smart shopping cart for customers. The automatic billing unit of the cart not only provides the customer with information about the product such as product expiry and price which helps keep a check on their total expenditure, but also allows the customer to bill the product instantly and avoid long queues to make payment. The self-driving feature of the cart acts as a guide for the customer to easily reach their product in shortest possible path. The cart is controlled using a Raspberry Pi single board computer (for self-driving) along with an Arduino micro controller (for automatic billing unit) and NodeMCU (for wireless communication) that can guide the user automatically to the desired product. Four 12V DC gear motors are used for the motion of the cart. This cart is integrated with RFID reader module to bill the product in real time. Breadth-First Search algorithm is used for finding shortest path. Image processing is used to realize the shortest path algorithm.