Pokémon Go's AR data has been turned into centimeter-accurate navigation for delivery robots
Niantic Spatial, an AI spinout born from the company behind Pokémon Go, has repurposed billions of player-captured images into a centimeter-accurate visual positioning system (VPS) for delivery robots. Coco Robotics is now using this technology to guide its roughly 1,000 sidewalk bots across US and European cities where GPS is too unreliable. The system was trained on approximately 30 billion images from Pokémon Go and Ingress, creating what Niantic calls a "living map" — a constantly updating 3D model of the physical world designed primarily for machines, not humans.