\u201cVisual positioning is not a very new technology,\u201d says Konrad Wenzel at ESRI, a company that develops digital mapping and geospatial analysis software. \u201cBut it\u2019s obvious that the more cameras we have out there, the better it becomes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Niantic Spatial has trained its model on 30 billion images captured in urban environments. In particular, the images are clustered around hot spots\u2014places that served as important locations in Niantic\u2019s games that players were encouraged to visit, such as Pok\u00e9mon battle arenas. \u201cWe had a million-plus locations around the world where we can locate you precisely,\u201d says McClendon. \u201cWe know where you\u2019re standing within several centimeters of accuracy and, most importantly, where you\u2019re looking.\u201d<\/p>\n
The upshot is that for each of those million locations, Niantic Spatial has many thousands of images taken in more or less the same place but from different angles, at different times of day, and in different weather conditions. Each of those images comes with detailed metadata that pinpoints where in space the phone was at the time it captured the image, including which way the phone was facing, which way up it was, whether or not it was moving, how fast and in which direction, and more.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The firm has used this data set to train a model to predict exactly where it is by taking into account what it is looking at\u2014even for locations other than those million hot spots, where good sources of image and location data are scarcer. <\/p>\n
In addition to GPS, Coco\u2019s robots, which are fitted with four cameras, will now use this model to try to figure out where they are and where they are headed. The robots\u2019 cameras are hip-height and point in all directions at once, so their viewpoint is a little different from a Pok\u00e9mon Go player\u2019s, but adapting the data was straightforward, says Rash.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rival companies use visual positioning systems too. For example, Starship Technologies, a robot delivery firm founded in Estonia in 2014, says its robots use their sensors to build a 3D map of their surroundings, plotting the edges of buildings and the position of streetlights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Rash is betting that Niantic Spatial\u2019s tech will give Coco an edge. He claims it will allow his robots to position themselves in the correct pickup spots outside restaurants, making sure they don\u2019t get in anybody\u2019s way, and stop just outside the customer\u2019s door instead of a few steps away, which might have happened in the past.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
A Cambrian explosion in robotics\u00a0 <\/p>\n
When Niantic Spatial started work on its visual positioning system, the idea was to apply it to augmented reality, says Hanke. \u201cIf you are wearing AR glasses and you want the world to lock in to where you’re looking, then you need some method for doing that,\u201d he says. \u201cBut now we\u2019re seeing a Cambrian explosion in robotics.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cVisual positioning is not a very new technology,\u201d says Konrad Wenzel at ESRI, a company that develops digital…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-516950","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}