I am just finishing the Intro to Artificial Intelligence free on-line class from Stanford.  There are probably many helpful things in this wonderful class taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun.  But I have to mention the Particle filter algorithm that can locate a vehicle in a previously mapped environment quickly and with minimal computation.  This type of localization is more precise than GPS and it can be used if GPS is not available, like indoors.  It was used in the DARPA grand challenge and in the Google self driving cars.  Professor Thrun is the head of the Goggle self driving car program and he explains how to implement the particle filter in 10 lines of C code.  You can see the classes on Youtube and  https://www.ai-class.com/home/

I believe this class set an all time record with 160,000 students signing up.