Customer Tracking Trolley for Customer Convenience

Abstract

This research explores the design and development of a Customer Tracking Trolley utilizing RFID technology to allow for cashless transactions. It also uses ultrasonic, infrared, and collision avoidance sensors to support better navigation and avoid collisions. The system proposed tackles key pain points experienced by retail businesses, including long check-in queues, incorrect billing, and inefficiencies in shopping in general. Our systematic methods provide promising results, enhancing customer satisfaction and business effectiveness, as shown by our thorough literature research and empirical studies. The Trolley system helps consumers by using the sensor network to guide them through the aisles while avoiding obstacles while at the same time using the RFID readers to identify goods picked by consumers. This system best applies to today\'s modern retails markets looking to enhance client service and reduce business costs.

Introduction

The retail industry continues to face recurring challenges such as long checkout queues, billing inaccuracies, and inefficient in-store navigation. The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies—particularly RFID, ultrasonic sensors, and infrared sensors—offers promising solutions to these issues. This research introduces a customer-tracking smart trolley system that automates billing using RFID and improves navigation and obstacle detection through sensor fusion.

The paper’s main contributions include designing an integrated trolley system, developing algorithms for RFID-based product identification, implementing sensor-based navigation, evaluating performance improvements such as reduced checkout time and higher billing accuracy, and analyzing the system’s economic feasibility.

A literature review highlights prior work in RFID-based shopping systems, sensor-based navigation, and integrated smart carts. While existing studies demonstrate accuracy improvements and enhanced customer experience, notable gaps remain—especially in combining automated billing with navigation assistance, performing real-world evaluations, assessing cost-effectiveness, and addressing broader user-experience aspects.

To bridge these gaps, the proposed methodology outlines a two-layer hardware–software architecture featuring an RFID reader, ultrasonic and IR sensors, and a microcontroller-based processing system. The hardware implementation includes a strategically placed RFID reader, multiple ultrasonic and infrared sensors for obstacle detection, and a user interface with an LCD display and control buttons.

Conclusion

Customer Tracking Trolleys are explained in the article with regard to its design, implementation, and testing. It combines RFID for automatic billing and ultrasonic and infrared sensors for navigation assistance. The experiments revealed that the time taken, billing accuracy, and customer satisfaction rate were dramatically improved as compared to conventional shopping systems. Based on the proposed system, it solved most issues faced by retailers, such as long waiting lines at checkout and poor navigation. The combination of RFID technology and a sensor network is an innovation that surpasses the present smart shopping offerings. While constraints remain, particularly concerning RFID performance with challenging materials and ultimate privacy concerns, the system does hold great promise to ultimately deliver an enhanced retail shopping experience. The implications for future work involve the inclusion of machine learning algorithms, sophisticated mechanisms for privacy enhancement, and augmented reality interfaces for further system advancement.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Prof. Sanika Patankar, Owais Sayed , Ketan Tajne, Abhijeet Takale , Tanmay Srivastava , Swara Yerawar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.