Design of a control system for robot shopping carts

Abstract

In order to assist elderly or disabled people in supermarkets, we have developed a control system for shopping carts that automatically follow their users. This system liberates elderly and disabled people from the burden of pushing shopping carts, because our proposed shopping cart is essentially a type of autonomous mobile robot that recognizes its user and follows him or her. In this paper, we describe the control system of a novel robot shopping cart that follows the user accurately and automatically. The accuracy is achieved by the infrared laser beam that the cart emits. The cart has a laser range sensor so that it can measure the position and distance of its user. The autonomous mobile robot shopping cart is equipped with an evasion system to prevent collisions with other people, store shelves or other obstacles. The robot shopping cart control system works by adapting itself to a general shopping cart by equipping it with driving part and process computer. Therefore, the device can be detached and can be used in different stores. We developed, implemented, and evaluated the robot shopping cart equipped with this system, and conducted numerical experiments on a simulator. The simulator uses the real data we have collected from the robot shopping cart we have built. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the robot shopping cart is feasible in real store environment. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.