India is a registered pioneer investor under UN Convention on the law of the sea and has been allotted a mining site in the Central Indian Ocean for exploration and exploitation of manganese nodules, available at depths of 5000m to 6000m in Indian Ocean. To this effect, a joint collaborative programme between national Institute of ocean Technology (NIOT), India and Institut F square r Konstruktion (IKS) of University of Siegen, GSermany was initiated to develop a crawler based deep sea mining system with a flexible raiser. This programme is funded by the Department of Ocean Development, Government of India. Before embarking upon realising the total hardware for deep sea mining, it had become imperative to prove the above concept under shallow water condition at depths around 500m.
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