Pokémon Go players built a 30-billion-photo map that’s now training robots to deliver your pizza
- Mar 20
- 1 min read
FORTUNE — Over the past decade, Pokémon Go players voluntarily submitted photos and short videos of public landmarks, street corners, storefronts, and urban intersections—all coming together to create a dataset that now stands at 30 billion images captured at ground level, across nearly every major city on the planet.
Niantic Spatial, the enterprise AI and mapping division spun from Niantic Inc., has spent years converting that trove into something the robotics industry has never seen before: a photorealistic, street-level, continuously updated model of the physical world, built specifically for robots.
That model is now being deployed to navigate Coco Robotics’ roughly 1,000 delivery bot fleet operating in cities across the country and around the world, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Jersey City, and Helsinki, logging millions of miles of deliveries to date.
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