Next-Gen Shopping: The Smart Shoppe Trolley for Autonomous Retail Navigation

This paper presents the design and implementation of a system aimed to improve user’s shopping experience in retail stores with busy environments. It introduces a Smart Shoppe Trolley, a new generation shopping cart as a possible solution to achieve this purpose. The system combines two technologies: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wi-Fi to develop an advanced shopping cart that can navigate, keep track of purchased items, and move autonomously. Complete design methodology and technological details along with the utilized hardware components and software are elaborated in this paper. Testing the prototype brought out several benefits such as improved efficiency, increased ease of access for disabled users, and enhanced eco-friendliness. This paper examined further developments of the Smart Shoppe Trolley such as refinement, integration with other mobile payment systems, and assessment of scalability.