30 billion images collected from Pokémon Go are used to train the robot

Niantic Spatial, an AI company separated from Niantic – a game developer Pokémon Goannounced the start of cooperation with American company Coco Robotics. In the future, Coco Robotics delivery robots will move on sidewalks thanks to Niantic Spatial’s Visual Positioning System (VPS), trained on more images taken by Pokémon Go players, helping the robot operate even in areas where GPS is not effective.

Many people believe that GPS is only unstable in remote areas, but in fact, this technology is also affected in the city, where there are many high-rise concrete buildings close together. These structures can cause signal interference, causing the positioning dots on the map to be misaligned. Unlike GPS, VPS determines a person’s location based on nearby buildings and landmarks. Niantic Spatial hopes the robot can use its VPS and four cameras to collect more accurate information about the surrounding environment, thus delivering goods on time.

Data source from Pokémon Go is also useful because players have to move to specific locations and point the phone camera at many different angles. This data was enhanced in 2020, when the game added a “Field Research” feature, which encourages players to scan real-world structures and landmarks with the camera to redeem rewards. In addition, part of the data also comes from “Pokémon arenas” – special locations for players to train or challenge.

By collecting images of a location from many people, Niantic Spatial captures information about this place in different weather conditions, lighting, viewing angles and altitudes, helping to increase accuracy. Additionally, with the huge number of Pokémon Go players, raw data is considered abundant.

Pokémon Go was a global phenomenon when it launched in 2016, urging a large number of users to go everywhere and point their phone cameras at specific locations to catch virtual creatures. According to Brian McClendon, Chief Technology Officer of Niantic Spatial, the application attracted 500 million installs in just 60 days. At its peak, Pokémon Go There are about 230 million monthly active users and it is currently estimated that the game still has about 50 million regular users.

Niantic said the collaboration with Coco Robotics is part of a long-term effort to build a “living” world map, continuously updated as new data becomes available. When operating on the street, delivery robots equipped with VPS continue to collect more information, providing it back to the system to further increase accuracy.

Theo MIT Technology Review, This is not the first time that data collected by Internet users for one purpose has accidentally served other purposes. One famous case is Google’s Captcha test, which requires users to click on images of bicycles or traffic lights to verify they are real people. Many computer scientists believe they are already being used to train AI vision models.