Indian Researchers Come Up With A Smart System To Prevent Airports’ Baggage Theft

Ravi Adwani - Jul 12, 2019

A team of researchers at LPU has recently come up with a smart system to deal with the common baggage theft issue at airports.

Researchers have recently developed a system to prevent baggage theft at airports. Despite tight security at most airports nowadays, baggage thefts are still widespread. Moreover, not much has been done to prevent this issue.

Airports aren’t equipped with the baggage locating or tracking system, forcing customers to wait in queues to collect their stuff. Notably, no one is there at the airport exit to verify rightful owners of the baggage.

Because of such reasons, a new smart system is coming to solve such problems once and for all.

A system to deal with baggage theft

Such a smart system can do that by offering ETA (estimated time of arrival) for pickup at the conveyor belt. It was the team at LPU (Lovely Professional University) that came up with this idea, hoping to prevent baggage theft issue at airport exit gates. Besides, this system is also capable of reminding passengers to collect their baggage.

People across the globe mishandle 40 bags every minute, according to SITA, a specialist in aviation IT. The number of mishandled bags was 24.8 million last year, costing the industry a significant amount of $2.4 billion.

How it works

Pawan Kumar Raghav, from LPU, did explain how their system works to solve the above problems. The team used technology from passenger database as well as logistics like bar codes. This system tracks baggage sitting on conveyor belts and informs their owners the approximate time to collect them.

When exiting, the system scans and authenticates the luggage details and only allows rightful owners of the baggage to leave. At the same time, if you forget to collect your belongings, the system will remind you. For now, researchers are waiting for their patent, after being chosen for further commercialization by the NRDC (National Research Development Corporation).

Cost isn't a challenge

The smart system doesn’t require significant space to deploy and therefore, easy to integrate. Depending on how many conveyor belts are there, the cost of this system will vary. Recently, the team at LPU has been working on a "miniaturized form,” a small version to test out the system. Since the infrastructure is already there, implementation cost won’t be much of a problem here.