Overview
- Niantic Spatial said its Visual Positioning System is being deployed with Coco Robotics to improve last‑mile navigation in U.S. and European cities.
- The model draws on more than 30 billion images and scans collected via Pokemon Go and Ingress gameplay over several years.
- By matching live camera views to this dataset, the system can locate devices within a few centimeters in urban areas where GPS often drifts.
- Niantic says scanning was voluntary and anonymized, though players and observers are challenging whether consent was adequately informed.
- Coco operates roughly 1,000 sidewalk robots in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Jersey City, Miami, and Helsinki, and reports more than half a million completed deliveries.