PADERBORN, Germany — Barcodes have been around since the 1970s, and while the technology that does the actual scanning of them has improved, another part of the process has not: Human arms are just as slow today as they were when the first box of macaroni and cheese went under the flickering lights.
The Real 360 may help speed up the process of going from shopping cart to the parking lot. A combination of segmented conveyer belt and a narrow tunnel of scanners, the assisted self-checkout solution was shown in late prototype form at Wincor World this week in Germany. When the bugs are worked out, ringing up a shopper's goods may take half as long.
Even the most experienced checker can process only about 30-40 items per minute. The Real 360 is designed to increase check-out to 60 items per minute—one a second, about a 100-percent improvement.
Here's how it works: The shopper approaches the scanner with his cart and puts no more than one item on the belt at a time, each going into about a foot-long partition. The item then passes through a collection of four scanners—top, bottom and both sides—which reads the barcode no matter which way the package bearing it is positioned. After being scanned, the item heads down rollers for bagging.
The Real 360 is planned initially to work with one cashier for one or two simultaneously operating belts, but one cashier for up to four belts is possible.
Some barriers remain before the prototype is ready for deployment. While Wincor representative Stefan Pankratz said the design might be final in six months to a year, the company must first solve how to cut the potential confusion of when two or more items are put on the same segment of the belt. While the scanner might be able to catch multiple barcodes, more likely one item will obscure the barcodes of the others. Image-recognition software, where programming can match stored item images with real-time camera input, will spot the problem, stop the belt and alert a cashier.
Another issue: The scanners are catching only about 95 percent of the items run across the belt. Pankratz expects new scanners to increase reliability to close to 100 percent very soon.
