How Pokémon GO players built inch

Popular scavenger-hunt game Pokémon Go turned city streets into an augmented-reality playground globally nearly a decade ago.

Now, the data generated by its players may soon help guide delivery robots with groceries and hot meals.

Niantic’s spatial computing division, Niantic Spatial, announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company that builds small autonomousrobotsdesigned for short-distance food and grocery deliveries.

The collaboration aims to use Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS) to help robots navigate sidewalks and dense urban environments more accurately, Popular Science reported.

According to the report, Niantic’s VPS technology can determine a device’s location with centimetre-level precision by analysing nearby buildings, landmarks, and other visual cues.

The system was trained on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go players over the years as they explored the real world searching for digital creatures.

Over the years, Pokémon Go encouraged players to wander the streets and parks, search for characters like Pikachu, and view their surroundings through their phone camera.

The report added that the game attracted nearly 230 million monthly active players worldwide.

“It turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco’s robot to safely and accurately move through the world is actually the same problem,” Popular Science quoted Niantic Spatial CEO John Hanke in a recent interview with MIT Technology Review.

By analysing images of the same locations captured by different players, Niantic’s system can account for changes in lighting, weather conditions, angles, and perspectives.

According to the company, this large-scale, crowdsourced visual dataset makes VPS particularly effective in environments where GPS signals can be unreliable.

Pokemon Go players unknowingly helped train delivery robots after generating over 30 billion real-world scans through the game
That data is now being used to help autonomous robots navigate city streetspic.twitter.com/fUL7hvtnwa
— Dexerto (@Dexerto)March 15, 2026
The development has sparked outrage, with several users questioning privacy concerns.

“Do you understand how scarry this is every scan every photo all stored in their logs,” a user wrote.

“Unpaid, didn’t consent, and thought they were just catching Pikachu.

Gotta map ’em all!” another user commented.

“30 billion scans?

that’s insane.

pokemon go basically crowd-sourced google maps 2.0 for free,” a third user reacted.