Kálmán's ideas on filtering were initially met with vast skepticism, so much so that he was forced to do the first publication of his results in mechanical engineering, rather than in electrical engineering or systems engineering. Kálmán had more success in presenting his ideas, however, while visiting Stanley F. Schmidt at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1960. This led to the use of Kálmán filters during the Apollo program, and furthermore, in the NASA Space Shuttle, in Navy submarines, and in unmanned aerospace vehicles and weapons, such as cruise missiles.[7]
Kálmán published several seminal papers during the sixties, which rigorously established what is now known as the state-space representation of dynamical systems. He introduced the formal definition of a system, the notions of controllability and observability, eventually leading to the Kalman decomposition. Kálmán also gave groundbreaking contributions to the theory of optimal control and provided, in his joint work with J. E. Bertram, a comprehensive and insightful exposure of stability theory for dynamical systems. He also worked with B. L. Ho on the minimal realization problem, providing the well known Ho-Kalman algorithm.
Kálmán also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1990.[12] and an Honorary doctorate from the Politecnico di Milano in 2012. Kalman died a few weeks before the conferment of the latter doctorate, so that his wife Dina attended the ceremony on his behalf, held in the Conference room of the Departement of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano on 12 September 2016.
Kalman, R.E. (1960). "A New Approach to Linear Filtering and Prediction Problems". Journal of Basic Engineering. 82 (1): 35–45. doi:10.1115/1.3662552. S2CID1242324.
Kalman, R. E. (1960). "Contributions to the theory of optimal control". Bol. Soc. Mat. Mexicana.
Kalman, R. E. (1963). "Mathematical description of linear dynamical systems". Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. 1 (2): 152–192. doi:10.1137/0301010.
Kalman, R. E.; Bertram, J. E. (1960). "Control system analysis and design Via the "second method" of Lyapunov: I — Continuous-time systems". Journal of Basic Engineering.
Kalman, R. E.; Bertram, J. E. (1960). "Control system analysis and design Via the "second method" of Lyapunov: II — Discrete-time systems". Journal of Basic Engineering.
Kalman, R. E.; Ho, B. L. (1966). "Editorial: Effective construction of linear state-variable models from input/output functions". Regelungstechnik.
A biography by Kalman's Ph.D. advisor, J R Ragazzini is given in "Dynamical Systems, Measurement, and Control", June 1977 pp. 73–75. This also has a list of Kalman's major publications.
