Autonomous Shopping Cart

In shopping centers across the United States, customers must return shopping carts after they used them by themselves. For a variety of reasons, a significant number of shopping carts are left in parking lots after being used. This results in expenses to the store in the form of damaged carts, man hours required to return each one, and law suits from customers whose cars are damaged by free carts. This project is an add-on mechanism by which allows shopping carts to return to the shopping center autonomously. The cart should be able to locate a preset track that is set in the parking lot and from this track return itself to the shopping center. This system would utilized a motor and wheels located on the rear of the cart, enabling it to be retrofitted to carts currently in use without impeding the cart’s ability to stack. This statement should evolve as your project progresses

Flexible thin film pH sensor based on low-temperature atomic layer deposition

Flexible and transparent zinc oxide (ZnO) thin film field-effect transistors (TF-FET) for the use as small volume potentiometric pH sensors are developed. Low temperature atomic layer deposition (ALD) is used for the fabrication of the metal oxides ZnO and aluminum dioxide (Al2O3). Changing the deposition temperature of the ZnO from 150 to 100 °C allowed a significant increase in resistivity by four orders of magnitude. Hence, adjusting the controlled low carrier concentration for the field-effect based sensor is demonstrated. ZnO TF-FET pH sensors fabricated on silicon/silicon dioxide (Si/SiO2) substrates are compared with sensors based on flexible and transparent polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) foil substrates. Comparison of both types of pH sensors showed successful pH sensitivity for pH ranging from 5 to 10 in both cases