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In the coming half-century, the global transport industry is expected to be affected by two technological revolutions - the first will start upon admission of autonomous vehicles to public roads, while the second will finalize a complete removal of manned vehicles away from them. As a result of the above revolutionary shocks, several major changes are anticipated: the modification of whole paradigm of ground vehicles; introduction of new business models in the transport sector, as well as new vehicle ownership forms; transition to technologies of collective and cooperative management and synchronized parrying the dangerous traffic collisions.

An open-link locomotion module (OLLM) is an autonomous energy self-sufficient locomotion setup for designing ground wheeled vehicles of a given configuration that includes drive/driven and steered/non-steered wheels with individual suspension and brake systems. Off-road applications include both trucks and trailers. The paper concentrates on the module's electro-hydraulic suspension design and presents results of analytical and experimental studies of a trailer with four driven (no wheel torque applied) open-link locomotion modules. On highly non-even terrain, the suspension design provides the sprung mass with sufficient vibration protection at low level of normal oscillations, enhanced damping and stabilized angular movements. This is achieved by the introduction of two control loops: (i) a fast-acting loop to control the damping of the normal displacements; and (ii) a slow-acting control loop for varying the pressure and counter-pressure in the suspension system.