The Autonomous Shopping Cart

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 02:13:33 -0500

PR project to prove out human tracking in crowds, navigation, shopping conceptualization. Demoed at Whole Foods, Microsoft Tech Week, featured on Stephen Fry’s Gadgetman.

This project came out of some of the initial Kinect work that started with the Board of Awesomeness. While the BoA’s research goals were focused on trying to find the limits of Kinect’s capabilities (lighting, vibration, motion, etc), the Cart came out of using the Kinect with a Trossen Robotics Eddie platform to actually do something useful with the Kinect. I wasn’t even the first to do something like this - I remember a Paparazzi bot (I did a check and couldn’t immeidately find the actual details) that would wander around tech conferences and use a DLSR camera to take pictures of people by both navigating around people and detecting faces and taking photos. I assume the DLSR was there to provide higher resolution photos than the Kinect was capable of, but I never managed to chat with the project creator.

Vision on Phil Wheat

The Autonomous Shopping Cart