Niantic Inc sold its video game business to Scopely Inc for $3.5 billion last year. Pokémon Go, Monster Hunter Now, and Pikmin Bloom were among the IPs sold. Niantic Spatial Inc was then formed to use the previously announced spatial artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The Large Geospatial Model (LGM) developed is now used by Coco Robotics in its delivery robot navigation system.
Spatial artificial intelligence and Visual Positioning System (VPS) systems are used to enable robots to make self-driving deliveries without human intervention. Both systems are developed using data from millions of Pokemon GO players.
VPS is different from GPS because it does not use satellite signals. Instead, the cameras on the robots know their location based on visual information such as buildings, street names, vegetation, and nearby structures. This means that the issue of signal loss in narrow alleys or between two tall buildings that GPS faces will not be a problem for the VPS system.
