Internet of things and radio frequency identification based embedded system to reduce shopping time in supermarkets

Abstract

Doing daily shopping in a Peruvian supermarket means a large investment of time for many people, usually due to inaccurate and faulty scanning of products by barcodes at supermarket checkout counters. For this reason, an embedded system based on internet of things (IoT) and radio frequency identification (RFID) is designed to reduce shopping time in a supermarket. The system uses an ESP32 development board with embedded hardware specialized in IoT projects and firmware development based on C language and real-time operating systems (FreeRTOS) through espressif’s IoT development framework (ESP-IDF). RFID tags were used to scan the products and IoT with message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) communication protocol are implemented to a local database in real time. The system achieves a significant reduction in terms of scanning time compared to self-service checkouts using barcodes, which allows to statistically analyze the reduced time per quantity of products and the linear trend of the 2 samples.