German’s self-driving streetcar puts autonomous tech on track

OF THE MANY acronyms engineers spend their lives internalizing, few are more valuable than KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Constrain the problem, reduce the variables, and make life as easy as possible when designing novel systems—like, say, a self-driving car. The world is a messy, complicated place. The less of it you need to solve, the closer you are to having a working product.

In the past year, Siemens' (passenger-free) street cars
 have puttered through Potsdam more than 450 times.

That's why Waymo tests and plans to deploy its vehicles in Chandler, Arizona, with its reliably sunny weather, calm traffic, and meticulously mapped roads. But even there, its robots are still reportedly running into issues with routine maneuvers, like left turns into traffic. Which makes it easier to understand why engineers in Potsdam, Germany, have taken the KISS idea to an extreme: They've put their autonomous vehicles on tracks. Siemens Mobility has spent the week showing off the first autonomous streetcar-style, light rail project—what Europeans would call a tram—at the giant InnoTrans rail trade show in Berlin.

Read the story by Jack Stewart from Wired - “German’s self-driving streetcar puts autonomous tech on track.”