Pokémon Go data now helps delivery robots find your food
Mar 14th 2026
Niantic repurposed billions of images from Pokémon Go to build a visual navigation tool and will use it with Coco Robotics to help sidewalk delivery robots navigate where GPS is unreliable.
- Niantic trained a Visual Positioning System on more than 30 billion images collected from Pokémon Go users.
- The VPS can pinpoint location to within a few centimeters by recognizing nearby buildings and landmarks.
- Niantic has partnered with Coco Robotics to equip short-distance delivery robots with VPS for last-mile navigation.
- VPS aims to fix GPS failures in dense urban areas and other environments where signal-based positioning struggles.
- The dataset grew from voluntary player scans and will expand as robots collect more map data, which raises questions about data reuse and privacy.