My Validation Layer Was Correctly Deleting 16% of My Good Data
Originally published at ai.bedvibe.studio . I built a real-time tracker in Rust — about two thousand lines — that reads a live ADS-B feed, keeps a Kalman-filtered track per aircraft, and screens every pair for closest approach against separation minima. Roughly 150 aircraft, a full cycle in under a millisecond. It ran clean. Tests passed, the picture looked right, the numbers were plausible. It…
The source material details a software engineering issue involving a real-time tracker built in Rust for processing ADS-B feed data. The tracker has a 16% rate of incorrectly discarding valid data. The issue arises from a constant lag between the actual timestamp of the data and the timestamp used by the Kalman filter, which leads to incorrect tracking and filtering of aircraft positions.
The fix requires advancing the Kalman filter's validity time only when a new measurement arrives, preventing the filter from being advanced by other means. This ensures that each observation is applied to the correct state of the filter, preventing teleporting aircraft and other anomalies caused by the incorrect timestamp handling.
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