Development of Pressure Sensing Array System for Retail Inventory Management

There have been various challenges associated with inventory management for supermarkets. These includes labor intensive stock taking procedures and mismatching of goods in retail store as compared to system record. These challenges will eventually result in the loss of sale for the company. In order to address the mismatching of goods and labor intensive issue, there is a need for real-time monitoring of the goods on the retail shelves. These will reduce the needs for manual stock taking, improve the efficiency in goods replenishment and thus resulting in overall sale profit. In this work, $8 \times 8$ pressure sensing array substrate with wireless module readout and tablet application has been developed as a demonstration prototype for monitoring the weight of goods on the shelve. The sensing system achieved a average repeatability error of 5.3% for a force range of 0.2N to 10.2N via bench-top charcaterisation setup. System firmware algorthim has been validated with a data error of less than 3% as compared to theoretical calculation.