Robotics Startup from Uber’s Founder: Atoms
Uber’s founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick broke his roughly 8-year silence to announce Atoms, which he has been secretly working on for some time.
Announced via a vision statement in Kalanick’s own words on the Atoms website to operate in food, mining, and transportation verticals, the company is actually a repackaged version of the physical AI and industrial automation operations of City Storage Systems, the parent company of cloud kitchen brand CloudKitchens where Kalanick is partner and CEO.
Shortly after being forced to resign from Uber in 2017, Kalanick joined CSS as CEO and took it to a valuation of $15 Billion in 2022. Unlike humanoid robots, Atoms appears to focus on industrial robots that do a specific job very well, though how it will manage operations in mining and transportation is not yet known.
A 30 Billion Image Side Hustle from Pokémon Go
It turns out that Pokémon Go—which revolutionized the blending of the physical world and mobile gaming upon its release in 2016, instantly flooded streets with players, and still maintains a hardcore fanbase—has been using the player data it gathered for years for an entirely different purpose. Niantic Spatial announced that it has opened its visual positioning system, trained with over 30 billion images taken by Pokémon Go users while completing in-game tasks, to Coco Robotics, a developer of delivery robots. Targeted to work especially in dense urban areas where GPS struggles, this system aims to pinpoint the robots’ locations at the centimeter level by looking at surrounding buildings and signs.
The data generated by players who roamed the streets for years hunting Pikachu now seems poised to help robots carrying orders navigate on sidewalks.
