Carbon Grocery Bot

Barcode scanning
Find the item
Tamagotchi
Tamagotchi
Bot-navigator
Bot-navigator
Bot-navigator

Inspiration

We were inspired by the idea of making shopping easier and more fun. We wanted to help people with impaired vision to navigate through the shop, since in a lot of cases, people who are not completely blind but are having troubles, this may be hard to detect signs in the distance, but it is easy to follow a moving object, and also people who may have trouble finding items in the store, because sometimes the directions can be confusing. Adittionally, people can check the sustainability of the company while also playing a background tamagotchi game.

What it does

Inside the application, user can input a desired item, and an available robot will guide them from the start to the point of interest. From that point, user can input another item and a pathfinder will show the direction again. We have also implemented a gamified process of scanning barcodes of different items. The scanner shows how sustainable the company is, which will help the user to decide if they actually want to support the company. Inside the app you would have your own virtual pet 'tamagotchi', whose life depends on how enviromentally friendly the companies are you decide to buy the item from, but it also changes the form with the levels, which increase when you get a certain number of points for your level, that you receive by scanning items and finding out new information about your day-to-day products.

How we built it

We used Arduino UNO to build a Navigation robot, implementing on the way blootooth communication between the python framework, which we needed to use in order to write A* pathfinding algorithm, and the Arduino IDE. We have also wrote a barcode scanner that fetches DItchCarbon API inside the kivy mobile app and integrated it with the tamagotchi.

Challenges we ran into

We have spent a lot of time trying to solve problems with the Blootooth communication and we also had some hard time at first, because we were not familiar with the kivy framework for the application. We had problems with the motors, which we managed to replace.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a user friendly way to make the shopping easier and more fun which hopefully will be integrated with the shops in the future

What we learned

We learnt how to use kivy and kivylang with python in order to make an app. We also expanded on our knowledge on AI to make a path finding algorithm using python which was challenging but fun. Finally, we learnt how to communicate between python and an arduino IDE using bluetooth.

What's next for Carbon Grocery Bot

We could improve the app to make it more fun by adding a leader board or with more funding a point system for coupons off groceries. We could also improve the bot and include more sensors like a microphone to make it more useful for the visually impaired in supermarkets.