Niantic Spatial said landmark scans submitted by Pokémon Go players were essential to building VPS 2.0, its visual positioning system that rolled out globally in April.
VPS 2.0 uses live camera images to identify a device's location and facing direction, and can place robots within centimeters near mapped landmarks while extending to nearby less-scanned areas through AI.
Coco Robotics is testing the system on sidewalk delivery robots that carry up to eight large pizzas, aiming to avoid GPS errors that can miss a robot's position by about 4.9 meters in dense cities.
Privacy concerns remain because player-generated scans helped train the system and Niantic has not disclosed the source of additional 'cheat sheet' data used for new locations, though it says uploaded photos cannot be run through VPS afterward.
The project also highlights Niantic's split last year: Niantic Labs kept Pokémon Go, while Niantic Spatial turned the game's crowdsourced mapping into a commercial navigation tool.
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