Sparks of genius

Liu Zehua (right) and his partner demonstrate their motion-sensing device.

But it was not just any shopping cart. It has three webcams and a closed circuit television camera, a voice control system and a complex electronic panel - the cart is more like a shopping-assistant robot.

It can follow its user while dodging other customers and carts, locate and guide the user to the exact product and broadcast product information, all automatically.

Wei led the invention program with other students from different departments in his university.

The intelligent shopping cart won the "golden award" of campus innovation at a national-level patent exhibition.

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Wei says a factory has expressed interest to fund the improvement of the design and promote the cart in supermarkets.

The expo attracted 1,500 students from 35 universities and colleges in Beijing, who brought in 172 patents, 118 inventions and 47 creative designs.

A water-saving toilet, an automatic chess table, a multi-functional bed, a housework service robot and a heart-rate monitoring mouse were among the inventions by college students that were attracting market interest.

With limited funding and some clever creativity, they could do as well as leading research and development institutes.

Liu Zehua, a senior from Automation School of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and his partner, who wore a motion-sensing suit with 16 electronic sensors, proudly showed off their work.

On a laptop screen, the movements were shown in 3-D simultaneously - the green-screen technology that has been used in movies with special effects.

According to Liu, a set of similar equipment could be worth from 160,000 yuan ($25,670) to millions. But it only cost him 1,000 yuan ($160).

Liu bought 16 pieces of typical gravity sensors in smartphones and spent a whole semester writing the program with his teammates.

"As far as I know, in China, only the China Academy of Sciences and my team have developed this device, which has widespread usage in many fields like the film industry," he says with a confident smile.