Pokémon Go players have unknowingly made a world map that serves to guide robots

BarcelonaIt has been ten years since a phenomenon that revolutionized the streets and phones of thousands of people around the world. The Pokémon Go app, an augmented reality game in which players have to go outside and search for creatures with their mobile camera, became a huge success. But the mobile cameras of users have served the game's creator, the company Niantic, to achieve a more ambitious goal. It has used the photos, without players knowing, to create a three-dimensional map of the world that autonomous robots will now use to move through the streets, especially when delivering packages and orders.

Niantic Spatial technology will power Coco Robotics' fleet of delivery robots so they can navigate precisely through cities. This will be achieved with the contribution of Pokémon Go players, a game that has more than 100 million monthly active users, according to ActivePlayer. The so-called visual positioning system (VPS), an advanced navigation technology, and the company's spatial artificial intelligence, will allow delivery robots to travel through urban areas, with tall buildings and a lot of people without having to worry about GPS precision. They will know where they are thanks to the giant map created with images from Pokémon Go players.

Niantic wants these robots to navigate much more precisely in places where traditional GPS is not so reliable, because tall buildings, for example, block the signal. The company assures that the model can identify a location on a map with centimeter accuracy. In fact, the agreement between Niantic and Coco Robotics is the first to use VPS technology for this purpose.

To train this AI model, 30 billion images of urban environments from Pokémon Go players (now owned by Scopely) and the game Ingress, which also works with augmented reality, have been used. For each location, there are photos taken at different times of the day, under different weather conditions and from different angles. The metadata includes information about the image capture, such as the exact location, the phone's orientation, and the speed at which the player took the photo.

According to the MIT Technology Review, about 1,000 suitcase-sized robots are distributed in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Jersey. Miami and Helsinki already deliver orders with this technology. But it's not just the players' images that will be used: the delivery robots will also contribute, with their photos, to creating a living map, that is, a hyper-realistic simulation of the world, explains Niantic Spatial's CEO, John Hanke.