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.”

Big Australia's rubbish future does not have to go to waste.

Would the concept of waste become obsolete if our garbage had value?

Veena Sahajwalla, who spoke at a Slap Tomorrow forum
 in Shepparton in 2013, says being able to create your own
 materials is "the ultimate empowerment".

Imagine if you could get paid for the things you put in your rubbish, and countries competed to import waste.

Waste is an environmental issue as well as a resource issue, and as Australia approaches 2050 and a population of 40 million, resources will be more valuable than ever.

Will we look back on single-use products as 21st century madness?

That depends on the policy decisions we put in place today, and whether we can transition to a circular economy.

Read the ABC News story by Nick Kilvert - “Big Australia's rubbish future does not have to go to waste.”