RFID Shopping Assistant Bots Revealed

In the entry titled “RFID-driven Shopping Assistant Robot soon to be tested in a mall,” I’ve reportend on a pilot test of RFID-enabled shopping assistant robots in Fukuoka. The pilot test started on February 9. PC Watch reported the opening event with some pics and Diamond City Lucle website has a video clip showing the robots.

It’s a bit of work to view the video (the page is in japanese and it requires special plug-in that requires IE to install, etc.) So, I decided to make some screenshots.

This is the shopping mall (Diamond City Lucle) where the pilot test took place:

The robots:

Robot walking:

RFID tags under the floor:

Item-level tagging (only some products):

a shopper carrying an active RFID tag:

RFID-driven Shopping Assistant Robot soon to be tested in a mall

NTT Communications and Tmsuk will test an RFID-driven shopping assistant robot at a shoping mall in Fukuoka. The robot reads RFID tags embedded in the floor and get information about its location (it doesn’t use GPS or other location technologies). The pilot test will take place on the 9th of February and lasts till the 15th.

The robot can assist in-store shoppers as well as remote shoppers at home.

[Helping in-store shoppers]
Shopper selects a destination (store) in the mall using a touch screen mounted on the robot. The robot then walk the shopper to the store, based on the location information obtained from about 5,500 RFID tags buried under the floor. When the shopper arrives at the store, the robot shows the information of the store. Some sales items in stores have individually RFID-tagged, allowing the shopper to get product information by holding a sales item near the robot’s display. Shoppers carry active tags that announce who they are, and the robot reads the information from the active tags and responds only to valid registered shoppers. In addition, shoppers can put their valuable belongings in the robots security box and the active tags are used to lock/unlock the box.

[Helping home shoppers]
Shoppers use a browser on a personal computer to control the service robot. The shoppers can view the in-store environments through the robot’s camera and communicate with (human) sales agents through videoconferencing. When a sales agents show a sales item to the robot, the robot recognizes the product and shows a relevant information on the screen of the remote shopper.

There are five different kinds of RFID tags used for this experiment.

1. Location marker tags (the ones embedded under the floor. passive RFID)
2. Store maker tags (similar to location marker tags but they provide information/ads from stores.
3. Tags for calling robots. (Shoppers have PDAs with embedded passive RFID tags. They can tell their robots where they are by showing the PDAs’ tags to an RFID reader installed in a store.
4. Human identification tags. (Shoppers carry card-type active RFID tags for identification purposes)
5. Product information tags. (Tags attached to individual sales items. passive tags)

here’s a slide that illustrates the ideas.

Source: NTT Communications News Release, February 2, 2006.
(in Japanese)

related:

• Shopper-Assisting Robots
• RFID Shopping Assistant Robot