Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The original title: "Why can't you steal from unmanned retail cabinets?" "

Have you ever used an unmanned retail cabinet? Compared with the early unmanned vending machines, unmanned retail cabinets will no longer have the embarrassment of "payment without delivery". With the new unmanned retail cabinet, all you have to do is scan the code to open the door, take out something, and then close the door, and the system will automatically settle the price.

In an unmanned retail cabinet, there will be 20 boxes of milk, 20 bottles of juice, 25 cans of coffee and 40 cans of soda, perhaps with 5 boxes of instant noodles and 10 bags of cakes. These add up to a rough calculation of 700 or 800 yuan, but maintenance personnel can rest assured and bold, let the small counter alone "manage" these goods.

Is there any way to "cheat" the unmanned snack cabinet and take away the goods in the cupboard for free?

No-one snack cabinet? the author provides the picture and takes it directly? Every item has an ID card. When you take the item out of the cupboard, you will find that there is a long label on it. Through the light, it seems that there is a "circuit" in the label. This is the "ID card" of every item.

Goods with RFID tags, Ryan pictures, this tag is called Radio Frequency Identification tag (RFID). You may have heard of this name for the first time, but RFID technology appeared in our lives a long time ago. Bus card, access card, canteen meal card. They all use RFID technology.

There are inductive coils in the meal card. The usual RFID system includes a reader, an electronic tag and an application system. Whenever you take away the goods, the RFID reader in the commissary cabinet will send a signal of a specific frequency, and the labels on each item will receive the signal, some of which will be converted into DC current to activate the tag, and then the label will feed back its own data information to the reader to complete the statistics of the product. The system knows what you took by calculating the reduced number of tags.

With the reduction of the cost of RFID system, this identification method is gradually applied to retail goods. Compared with QR code scanning, RFID has obvious advantages: faster and easier to operate. In the settlement, only need to put all the labels on the reader, the system can quickly identify all the goods. The next time you go to buy clothes, check to see if the label of the clothes is printed with the word RFID.

The clothing label with the RFID logo can be seen through the light. The author's drawing RFID is replacing the QR code as a more efficient way of settlement. Many colleges and universities also use this method of settlement in the canteen: using tableware with RFID tags, the system can directly identify plates with different prices during settlement, which can quickly read the meal price and achieve fast settlement.

The unmanned small counter of Shanyuan Technology further expands this advantage of RFID: it does not need to scan the goods manually, as long as the electronic label is within the reading range, it can be quickly identified.

Tear the label? Let me calculate how much it weighs! Although the RFID tag is convenient, if you tear off the RFID tag on the product and put it back into the cupboard, won't the cabinet find out anything?

An empty bottle of drinks? This way of using RFID tags in Ryan drawings is not to detect objects, but to judge tags. Therefore, in the early days, unmanned snack cabinets that only used RFID tags were stolen many times, and the loss rate of some goods in the cupboard remained high.

In addition to being easily torn up, the cost of RFID equipment is also high. Although the price of RFID tags has been reduced to 0.40 yuan each, but each item needs to be labeled with RFID tags, and the extra cost is not a small amount.

In order to solve the problems existing in RFID and realize the direct judgment of the objects in the cabinet, a new method appears in the snack cabinet-weight detection. Every time the item is removed and the cabinet door is closed, the weight sensor in the snack cabinet will detect the weight of the current item and calculate the difference between the weight before opening the door and the weight before opening the door, thus realizing the judgment of the item taken away.

The cupboard with gravity sensor? reference [2] it is obvious that once there are many kinds of goods in the cabinet with similar weight, or the weight of the combination is similar, this simple weight measurement method is very difficult to work, so there are also many kiosk cabinets using the dual detection method of RFID + weight testing to ensure accurate judgment.

You're staring, don't take it! If you take a bag of 300g pebbles, open the cabinet door, take out a glass of fat house happy water, tear off the label, stick it on the stone bag and put it in the cabinet, then you will have a glass of fat house happy water for free.

Even with RFID tags and weight sensors, there is still a risk of losing goods, so why not just use the camera to identify the image of the item?

The camera at the top of each floor: there are already many "untagged" kiosks on the market, and their principle is to use additional cameras to directly identify the captured images.

This kind of cupboard usually installs a wide-angle camera at the top of each floor to identify each item by comparing the photos before opening the door and after closing it, so as to get the goods taken away.

In this way, the processor in the snack cabinet needs to process multiple photos, which requires higher processing speed of the system, so it often happens that the phone has been waiting for the settlement page after buying.

The neatly arranged snack cabinets are easy to identify. The author's drawing supply is also limited by the light, the placement of items and other problems. The use of image recognition in the cabinet design also requires more consideration.

After scanning the code, you still want to run? No matter which product identification method is used in the kiosk, there is generally a special surveillance camera to monitor the purchase behavior of users. At the same time, when scanning the code to open the cabinet door, the relevant services of the snack cabinet will be required to obtain some personal information. When an order is abnormal, the manager can quickly lock the problem order and call up the relevant monitoring. So, don't try to buy anything from the snack cabinet for free.

When in use, it is required to bind a mobile phone. Some people will complain that the items in the snack cabinet are more expensive than those bought in normal stores. Compared with the stores, they need more manpower to supplement and maintain the goods. At the same time, compared with the old vending machines, they also have higher equipment and technical costs. When you experience the convenience of a snack cabinet, the extra money you spend can be regarded as paying for the time saved.

reference

[1] Li Xiaowu. Research on tag recognition technology of mobile RFID system [D]. Southwest Jiaotong University, 2015.

[2] Lin Xiebin. An intelligent retail method and device [P]. Beijing: CN110321743A,2019-10-11.

[3] Xiang Lin Will the unmanned container be the next tuyere? [N]. Securities Times, 2017-12-23 (A03).

[4] Huang Lian. A shared unmanned retail cabinet [P]. Guangdong: CN207909247U,2018-09-25.

Hu Hongliang, Guan Lei, Xu Da, Zhang Jielong, Ren Zhiheng. Unmanned retail cabinet and unmanned retail cabinet monitoring system [P]. Anhui: CN207780890U,2018-08-28.

[6] Global and Chinese RFID (Electronic label) Industry Research report from 2016 to 2020

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fruit Shell (ID:Guokr42), author: Owl, Editor: Luna

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.