Pokemon GO creator, Niantic, revealed in March 2026 that it’s been working with other companies to train delivery robots by using data captured by players. The smash-hit mobile game from 2016 where players go out into the real world to capture Pokemon hiding near them has received over 1 billion downloads over the years. That’s a lot of people using Pokemon GO to capture images all around the world, and it seems Niantic has found a use for those images.
Niantic, now known as Niantic Spatial, no longer owns or runs Pokemon GO. The hit mobile game was part of a $3.5 billion sale to Scopely back in early 2025. The sale of Pokemon GO and Niantic’s entire mobile game library left some people excited and others upset at the time. The future of the title was left up in the air, and fans were concerned about the uncertainty.
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Pokemon Go Creator Niantic Uses Player Data to Train Pizza Delivery Robots
On March 10, 2026, Niantic Spatial announced that the original creator and runner of Pokemon GO has teamed up with a robotics startup company called Coco Robotics to use player-collected data to help train delivery robots. Coco Robotics has a fleet of about 1000 suitcase-sized robots, which are designed to carry and deliver pizzas in busy city environments. Common forms of travel data, such as GPS, don’t work well on their own for robots in cities.
The partnership with Niantic Spatial is intended to use the millions of photoscans of real-world streets, landmarks, and buildings captured by Pokemon GO players to form a model that the “brain” of the robot will refer to while traveling in order to help itself navigate. The combination of GPS data and the world map built by photoscans from players is intended to help the robots navigate more efficiently without getting lost. A game as popular as Pokemon GO has given the AI model used by the robots over 30 billion images to train with. What makes Niantic’s images so useful is that their game funneled players to the same hot spots throughout their cities, where they all took pictures of the same places, but from a variety of different angles with different lighting and weather conditions.
Robots are already on their way into the gaming industry, and it becomes more apparent with each passing year that robots will likely play a role in the world moving forward. A video game company using data collected from players to help train pizza delivery robots was more than likely not what anyone expected. The use of a Pokemon mobile game to help train robots showcases the creative solutions engineers are coming up with to advance AI and robotics further.
In a world where players are constantly concerned over their privacy and data usage, it’s worth noting that Niantic did not secretly capture data from players’ phones over the years. All the data used was intentionally captured while Pokemon GO was being actively played. It will be interesting to see if there are other innovative ways to use the unique data gathered from Pokemon GO in the future.
- Released
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July 6, 2016
- Engine
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Unity
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op