Heidelberg Mobil International GmbHBerliner Straße 4169120 Heidelberg

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Product fi nder for supermarkets

Where is the shower gel, and how do I get to the bakery section? In large supermarkets in particular, looking for products costs shoppers time and nerves. Indoor positioning and navigation software provide customers with the fastest route to the product group they are looking for.

The product fi nder can be used by anyone who has installed the supermarket app. All shoppers have to do is choose the relevant product group from a list in the app. An interface then connects the app with IBM Watson IoT and retrieves the current position of the RFID tag signifying the shopping cart. Since shoppers are then connected to this via a QR code, they can be shown their current location as well as the most direct route to the product group they require. Only the RFID tag on the shopping cart is used to locate the user – neither the shoppers themselves nor their smartphones are located.

Indoor positioning is implemented via RFID antennas which query the position of the RFID tags once every second. Based on the signal strength, the antenna calculates the distance to each of the RFID tags and stores the distances on the server installed in the supermarket. The server then calculates the most likely position of the shopping cart based on all the distances provided by the antennas (using triangulation). The complex location data is stored by IBM Watson IoT in the form of spreadsheets, but further processing is required for visualization of the data.

Heidelberg Mobil’s contribution

The digital visualization of the supermarket sales area for the app is provided by Heidelberg Mobil. The map shows the position of all of the product segments and shelf space. The Deep MapTM technology at the root of this also creates an interface to IBM Watson that makes it possible to transform the abstract information into a spatial representation. The start point of the routing is the shopping cart, which is located through position fi nding on the site plan, and the destination point is the selected product group. As shoppers make their way through the supermarket, their current position is determined every second, and the shortest route to the destination point is calculated and visualized as a routing graph on the map.

Technical infrastructure based on Radio Frequency Identifi cation (RFID)

Cognitive systems in conjunction with Deep MapTM technology

Smart navigation to where you want to go