ABSTRACT
Nowadays, shopping malls and stores are places where people get necessary items for everyday life. In supermarkets, shopping trolleys are used for collecting the various items. Once collection of items is completed, one has to go to the payment counter for billing. The store manager makes the customer bill using barcode reader at the billing counter, which is a very time-consuming process and also results in a long queue in front of the product checkout counters for billing. The need of the hour is to design a futuristic trolley system which can automatically: (i) recognize face of the person, (ii) control trolley movement, (iii) calculate the number of items in the trolley with their total cost, and (iv) classify the objects in the store. Store managers are always interested in highly efficient systems to manage stocks and track items over the store chain in a productive way; product placement and inventory management are major problems that occur due to the absence of liaison between floor managers and real-time intelligence gathering from the store. The aim of designing futuristic trolley system is to endow the floor managers with better knowledge and decision-making abilities based on the previous purchase patterns and live customer tracking to provide the customers a hassle-free shopping experience. Various trolley-based models have been developed over the past years, but most of the system is plagued by problems such as card-based user authentication for customer check-in, billing queues, and lack of advancement in the trolley. The purpose of this chapter is to classify and review previous trolley models for shopping. In addition, a comparative analysis of different existing models is given along with their strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, this chapter also introduces a proposed idea of futuristic trolley by focusing on some limitations of current research activities. In future, this idea has the potential to become one of the frameworks which will make life simpler for the users in stores.
