Go get yourself a wash: Siemens is teaching trams to drive themselves

It’s not just cars that will soon be driverless: Cities with trams stand to gain even more from the coming wave of autonomous driving technology.

A consortium led by Siemens is developing ways to make trams autonomous as part of a three-year project called Astrid (Autonomous Tram in Depot), involving a fully automated depot in which trams can control themselves, Siemens Mobility has announced.

The project, scheduled to start in October, will see trams starting to become independent of humans in a depot of the German city of Potsdam outside Berlin.

Here, trams will learn to do things like take themselves to get washed or drive onto a separate track when not in use.

“Astrid is the next major milestone on the road to autonomous trams,” said Sabrina Soussan, CEO of Siemens Mobility. In the medium term, automated depots are to be made commercially viable as “a first stage of autonomous driving,” according to Siemens.-The Star