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The Trolley Buddy System
The Trolley Buddy System aims to reduce the amount of neglected shopping trolleys in the community through smart sensor and monitoring technologies, ensuring advantages for the consumers and retailers. This results in a mesh network enabled system with 2 primary nodes, the Trolley and Bay Nodes.
Every year in Australia, 700,000 shopping trolleys are neglected outside of designated return locations and despite the value they provide, drives frustration within local communities to manage this issue. Supervision of these trolleys is placed on retailers that despite the rising cost of purchasing new trolleys lack the opportunity of IoT systems and technologies that can provide an improved user experience and data-led insights into their fleets as they have in other domains. Existing solutions require a completely new shopping trolley to access smart functionality resulting in large costs that often negatively impact on the customer experience despite the benefits.
The Trolley Buddy Network addresses this challenge with the creation of digital trolley access and tracking for businesses. The system contains 2 nodes, the Trolley Node and Bay Node. The Trolley Node attaches to existing shopping trolleys allowing for customers to digitally deposit funds to temporarily unlock a trolley which is displayed on the E-paper display. This also allows for location, funds and trolley status monitoring on a per trolley basis. The Bay Node is placed on trolley bays and designated return locations with the integrated sensors observing the fullness of trolley bays and to gauge the Trolley Nodes positions.
The Trolley Buddy User Process
The below video documents the process of a customer in order to return their shopping trolley. Firstly, the user taps a payment or rewards card on the trolley buddy to deposit $2 into the device. This will then unlock the cable and remove them from the connected line. The trolley is now free to use!
The return process follows, with the user placing the trolley near another in order to place the charging tag and NFC chip to detect if the trolley has been returned successfully which will result in a refund of the temporary $2. The Trolley Buddy system adapts an existing customer habit to drive results.
Trolley Buddy Showcase Renders
The front interface employs a metaphor of faces to humanise shopping trolleys and increase return rates,
Manufacturing the Trolley Buddy
Production of the nodes has been optimized for affordability and to match the brand identity of retailers. Both nodes employ recycled HDPE from milk bottles with an injection moulding process to construct the primary white shell, in addition to the retailer colour matched outer cover. For the Trolley Node, 2 bolts are employed in order to attach the back plate to the primary housing with a standard mounting option to allow for retrofittment on existing shopping trolleys.
From a sustainability lens the Trolley Buddy Network is retrofittable onto existing trolleys which lowers the potential manufacturing of new trolleys. The outer and inner casings of both devices would be produced from 100% recycled HDPE from milk bottles. If a trolley is lost the Trolley Node can be completed disassembled with only 2 bolts containing the open-sourced ESP-32 board.
A representation of the colour options in order to match key retailers.
The Trolley Buddy System (2025)
Designer: Jake Boceski
Project Length: 14 weeks
Subject: Smart Design
Primary Tools: Solidworks, Keyshot Studio, Arduino IDE
Supervisors: Anton Nemme