Amazon Is Testing the Dash Cart, a Shopping Cart That Evaluates All the Items In It

Amazon introduced an all-new technology for their smart store known as Dash Cart. Dash Cart automatically identifies the products kept inside it. It will initially be made available at the Amazon grocery shop in Woodland Hills, California later this year.

This automatic value detecting cart will not be like any other shopping cart. One won’t be able to stock up stuff. For now, it is only usable for small to medium sized grocery items. The technology basically is designed to identify the particles inside the basket in order to ease the checkout procedure.

Amazon Dash Cart uses specially designed computer algorithms and sensors that detect the price of every item put in it. Then, all you have to do is to go through the dash cart lane in checkout area. The sensors will identify the cart and charge you from your account linked with Amazon accordingly.

That’s not it! The cart will also be equipped with a screen, which you can use to access your Alexa shopping list and check off things. One can also see the current grand total of the cart and redeem coupons from the cart.

In a video provided by Amazon, it can be seen that the cart needs to see the barcode of the product, so basically, you are your own cashier in a sense. In another clip that explains how items can be checked in without barcode, all that the customer has to do is put in the PLU number on the screen and confirm the weight.

In Amazon’s website, you won’t see barcode reading mentioned anywhere; however, they say that Dash Cart uses “computer vision algorithms” and “sensor fusion”. We have seen similar technology in “Just Walk Out”, a technology used in Amazon Go stores. But “Just Walk Out” uses a camera-mounted system and shelf sensors to detect the items taken out of them.

We can’t really say that the Dash Cart is just a bar code scanner on wheels; it does many more things. But Amazon hasn’t been really hyping up the new feature as it did with “Just Walk Out” and hasn’t been very transparent either.

The introduction of technologies such as “Dash Cart” and “Just Walk Out” have been a great step towards easy shopping and we can expect to see more such technology in near future.