Pokémon Go's 30 Billion Photos Now Training Delivery Robots
Niantic Spatial, spun from Niantic Inc., has converted a decade of crowdsourced Pokémon Go player photos into a street-level mapping model built for robots. Over the years, players voluntarily submitted photos and videos of public landmarks and urban intersections, building a dataset of 30 billion ground-level images spanning nearly every major city on the planet.
That model now powers Coco Robotics' roughly 1,000 delivery bots in cities like LA, Chicago, Miami, and Helsinki. Niantic Spatial's Visual Positioning System bypasses GPS by comparing live robot camera feeds against the image database in real time, solving a persistent accuracy problem in dense urban areas where tall buildings interfere with satellite signals. (
Source: Fortune)
