'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images
Summary
Popular Science reports that Niantic Spatial used billions of Pokémon Go player images to train Coco Robotics' Visual Positioning System, enabling centimeter-level localization for delivery robots. The article explains how crowdsourced data, collected for a game, can be repurposed to improve robot navigation and build a 'living map' of the world, while raising privacy and data-use concerns about consent and potential government access. It also frames this development within broader challenges of GPS reliability in urban environments.