This paper reviews and discusses some important design and positioncontrolparameters and issues of the deep seafloor nodule collectorminersof a few consortia, including the subsystems that the internationalconsortia had developed since the 1970s. It includes the OMCO’s fullscaletests of design, deployment, and touchdown of its self-propelled,remote-controlled miner on the 16,000-ft-deep seafloor.First, the paper revisits major technological activities from pastresearch/development, design, and tests by the four international oceanmining consortia in the ‘70s, and proposes baseline design parametersand issues in the development of commercial manganese nodule miningsystems from the deep seabed in the 2,000–6,000-m depth range. Amongthe four consortia, the Ocean Minerals Co. (OMCO)/Lockheed reportedthe two full-scale tests and concurrent development of a commercialdeep-ocean mining system and technology of automatic ship-pipebuffer-link-control with a self-propelled, automatic track-keeping mineror mining vehicle.The commercial mining system incorporates more recent computercontrolledautomatic position or track-keeping control operationsimulations, as well as the miner speed control accounting for varyingseafloor geotechnical properties and nodule abundance distribution forthe integrated system of ship-pipe-miner subsystems and design andcontrol operation in a series of papers.
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