An IoT smart basket with sensor fusion and a companion app that lets shoppers skip the checkout line entirely — hardware through to app.
A retail-tech startup set out to remove the checkout line in busy airport-retail environments, where time-pressed travellers abandon purchases rather than queue.
Delivering a true self-checkout experience meant solving it end to end — physical sensing hardware, reliable item recognition, and a frictionless payment app — as one integrated product, on startup timelines.
We integrated barcode/RFID, weight, ultrasonic sensors, and camera modules into a smart basket, fusing their signals to know what's in the cart in real time.
Item recognition and cart tracking keep an accurate running tally as items go in and out.
A companion mobile app handles in-app payment and self-checkout, so the shopper never joins a queue.
A full remote product team delivered hardware, firmware, recognition, and app as a single integrated build.
No single sensor type reliably solves item identification at checkout — barcode scanning alone misses items placed without a clean barcode-facing orientation, weight alone can't distinguish two items of similar mass, and camera-only systems struggle with occlusion when a basket fills up. The basket combines barcode/RFID reading, weight sensing per item placement, ultrasonic proximity sensing to detect item add/remove events, and camera modules for visual confirmation — with onboard compute fusing these signals to determine, with high confidence, what was added or removed and when.
Running all sensor fusion in the cloud would introduce latency that breaks the 'just walk out' experience — by the time a cloud round-trip confirms an item was added, the shopper has already moved on. Sensor fusion and item-event detection run on the basket's onboard compute, with the resulting cart state synced to the companion mobile app in near real time. The app is where the shopper sees their running total and completes payment; the basket's job is purely to maintain an accurate, low-latency cart state.
The cloud backend's role is reconciliation: linking a basket's session to a shopper's account, maintaining the authoritative cart record, handling payment on checkout, and — for the retailer — feeding accurate basket-level data back into inventory systems. Edge cases (an item added then removed, a sensor-fusion low-confidence event needing app-side confirmation, a basket going out of connectivity range mid-session) are handled with a reconciliation protocol between basket and backend rather than assuming the edge state is always correct.
The result was a working self-checkout experience that removed the line entirely — proof that a small senior team can deliver an integrated hardware-plus-software product from the ground up.
Tell us what you're building. We'll tell you the fastest honest path to shipping it.
Start a conversation →