The Sneaky Way Pokémon Go Became a Massive Robot Training Program
Via Popular Science
Summary
Niantic Spatial, the company behind Pokémon Go, has partnered with delivery robot company Coco Robotics to use its Visual Positioning System — a navigation tool trained on over 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go players — to help robots navigate city streets more precisely than GPS alone.
Unknowingly, years of players scanning real-world landmarks while hunting virtual creatures has created a massive crowdsourced mapping dataset that will now guide food delivery robots to their destinations.
