Viveca Wallqvist has been one of the speakers at the big Transport Conference Transport Forum held in Linköping this week. She works for the research institute RISE and is developing machines that can handle everything from sanding, mowing grass, sweeping and plowing to salting roads and taking care of autumn leaves. From a control room, a person should be able to operate several such vehicles.

- It's not just a matter of saving on personnel, in certain situations, for example on a difficult mountain road, it can be an advantage that the driver does not have to sit in the vehicle, she says

Reality in a few years

Viveca Wallqvist started researching driverless work vehicles when her father fell ill:

- He found it difficult to get along with the walker in the winter wall, so I was thinking about how to improve snow removal through unmanned vehicles and discovered that there was no international research in the area.

Much of the technology has already been developed, with the help of drones, for example, you can see what is in the snow and if there is a risk of driving on something, so within a few years the machines can be out of traffic. The tests that are being done now include how pedestrians react when they see a vehicle with an empty cab.