He periodically returned to Fontainebleau from 1969 to 1972 at MINES ParisTech where he served as scientific advisor for Centre de recherches en automatique.

Starting in 1973, he also held the chair of Mathematical System Theory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.

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.