We were approached by a leading Mobile Point of Sale provider to help test their mobile applications and their bespoke payment devices. The traditional test mechanisms use USB debugging to achieve automation on the device under test (e.g., an iPad). These options were not available in this case. Based on our previous experience, we elected to use a Room Gantry with a touch-screen finger mounted on the Z axis to interact with the screen, and linear rails to insert and remove Chip and PIN cards from card readers.
We have integrated a full solution that uses Keysight Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) to control the overall test, it has advanced OCR capabilities that allow us to read the screens using cameras. The payment cards are either physical cards that are selected from sets of multiplexers or from specialist payment test tools such as the UL Brand Test Tool. The tests that are performed have hundreds or thousands of variations. The solution reads which variation is required and executes the test reliably and efficiently.
Using robotics has a further advantage of providing a repeatable mechanism to test reliability. The robots have performed thousands of transactions at any time of day or night. Our solutions can work in a fully unattended manner, test executions can be initiated remotely, e.g. from India. The results are readily available from anywhere in the world that has internet.