The activities carried out in the first and second reporting period were focused towards creating nr. three instances of the MIMEX store in the cities of Trento, Istanbul and Malaga. All the work-packages pushed towards this common objective and its related components. In particular, WP2 set the basis for the definition of the functionalities and requirements of the testbed – also to be exploited in the project’s two pilot sites in the second year. In WP2, we conducted three rounds of stakeholder surveys, whose results helped the team to define and tailor various aspects of MIMEX’s solutions to make the products on sale and the services offered more attractive to shoppers, MIMEX solution customers, and also to the potential suppliers of goods and support services. In WP3 and WP4, the consortium focussed on the realization of the software and hardware components. In WP3, we created a server infrastructure to run shop services, spread across cloud servers and physical computing machines. Also, the people tracking system patented by FBK (the “SmarTrack”), was adapted for the dynamics of a micro-market. Various adaptations were introduced to improve the overall responsiveness and precision of the tracking system, ensuring people could be tracked consistently, with a minimal loss of tracking. We also defined an innovative approach to help reduce the effort required to train the system to detect new products added to the shop’s inventory. The idea is to exploit the redundancy of information produced by the weighing scale monitoring system and the vision system (i.e. both identifying objects/products taken from and them released on the shop shelves) to automatically collect and label new images of products in the hands of shopper when a weight-change event is detected. In WP4, a weighing scale prototype was created and patented. It was also installed in an innovative fridge unit which allowed to extend the types of products within the store and being finally part of an industrialized MIMEX version. In WP5, all of the activities related to the physical construction of the Pilots were carried out. We defined the space where to settle them and commissioned companies to build them. Once the physical structure was ready, we mounted the racks, cameras, and all of the necessary equipment. This procedure repeated for the creation of the three instances of the MIMEX store. The testbed is installed within the FBK research centre in Trento and open to their employees, Pilot 1 is open inside a shopping mall in Istanbul, and Pilot 2 is the container version set up in the campus of the University of Malaga. All the demonstrators allow for a complete shopping experience based on people recognition, products detection, and payment. In WP6 the consortium worked on the dissemination and exploitation. The pilots were used to organize demo sessions with users, stakeholders and potential customers. Some of them already showed an interest in investing in the solution and adopting it for their business. These are steps that the consortium outlined in their business and commercialization strategy that will be the driver for the definition of a future business after the end of the project.
