Urban Forssell, Head of AI Strategy and Innovation at Digital Futures and affiliated with the KTH Research Support Office, has been awarded the 2025 IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Sustained Impact Paper Award.
The award recognizes the long-term scientific and technological impact of the paper “Particle Filters for Positioning, Navigation, and Tracking”, published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing in 2002. The paper, co-authored by Fredrik Gustafsson, Fredrik Gunnarsson, Niclas Bergman, Urban Forssell, Jonas Jansson, Rickard Karlsson, and Per-Johan Nordlund, introduced a powerful particle filtering framework that has significantly influenced real-time positioning, navigation, and tracking systems.
By combining particle filters with Kalman filtering through marginalization, the work enabled efficient handling of nonlinear models and non-Gaussian noise, with demonstrated applications in automotive and airborne navigation. The methods have shown accuracy comparable to GPS while offering higher integrity, and have inspired applications ranging from map matching to integrated navigation and target tracking.
The award will be formally presented at ICASSP 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, underscoring the enduring relevance and impact of this research more than two decades after its publication.
