best games of 2016 that youve never heard of

The Internet of things will require Kalman filters in trillions of smart objects to guide them to where and when we want them, at our workplaces, in our homes, and elsewhere in our lives.

This means millions and perhaps billions of Kalman filters.īut then there’s the Internet of things, the much anticipated infrastructure of a connected, smart world of the future. The very same guidance and navigation problems faced by Apollo engineers 50 years ago-how to locate objects accurately in the vastness of space-challenge engineers today as they design self-driving cars that can navigate safely in smart cities, augmented-reality computer games, and robot companions to work on the factory floor and in your home.Īll these inventions require precise information, what we call “microlocation,” in some cases down to millimeters, to ensure that your self-driving car parks in your garage and not on your lawn, that your virtual-reality gaming headset makes you fly and not vomit, and that your trusted robot companion pours coffee into your cup and not on your lap. Within the next decade the Kalman filter will be at work in consumer technologies that will change your life in equally profound ways. Drive your car into a tunnel, for example, and you lose GPS, but the Kalman filter still achieves pretty good dead reckoning until you come out the other side and get a new GPS “fix.”īut that’s only the beginning of the impact that Rudolf Kálmán’s work will have on the world. Each has noise and inaccuracy of different types the Kalman filter combines them for the best of both worlds. The phone’s GPS sensor provides real-world coӧrdinates on the face of the Earth, while its accelerometers sense rapid, small motions. Nearly that same calculation, with modernized Kalman filters, happens routinely inside your mobile phone. Someone once described the entire GPS system-an Earth-girdling constellation of satellites, ground stations, and computers as “one enormous Kalman filter.” These include aerospace systems such as the computers that landed Apollo astronauts on the moon, robotic vehicles that explore our world from the deep sea to the outer planets, and nearly any endeavor that needs to estimate the state of the world from noisy data.

His fundamental contribution, an algorithm called the Kalman filter, made possible many essential technological achievements of the last 50 years. If you’re not an engineer, however, you have probably never heard of the brilliant inventor Rudolf Kálmán, a Budapest-born engineer and mathematician who died on July 2 in Gainesville, Florida, at age 86. Innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all contributed mightily to the technologies that have transformed our daily lives and society.

Many of the inventors who fueled the digital revolution have become household names.

Best games of 2016 that youve never heard of