Deep Sea Mining Robot Collectors and Where ABB Fits

Four to six kilometres down, on the abyssal plains of the Pacific, lie billions of tonnes of polymetallic nodules: dark lumps of manganese with nickel, copper and cobalt mixed in. Getting them up takes a deep sea mining robot, a collector vehicle that drives across the seabed while a ship and a riser pipe wait above. This post follows the idea from the first dredged nodules in the nineteenth century to the collector trials of the 2020s and the US permit push this autumn, and looks at where ABB robots and technology could fit.

Manganese nodules from the South Pacific. Photo: Hannes Grobe/AWI / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How nodules went from dredge hauls to a CIA cover story

Nodules were first found in 1868 in the Kara Sea, in the Arctic off Siberia. The bigger find came from HMS Challenger, which sailed from Portsmouth in December 1872 under Captain George Nares, with Charles Wyville Thomson leading the science. For more than three years its crew lowered dredges and sounding lines to the ocean floor and hauled up sediment and manganese nodules, which turned out to occur in most of the world's oceans. Resource-grade nodules hold roughly 27 to 30 percent manganese, 1.25 to 1.5 percent nickel, 1 to 1.4 percent copper and 0.2 to 0.25 percent cobalt, and they grow only 10 to 20 millimetres in a million years.

A manganese nodule, also called pelagite, from the deep floor of the Pacific Ocean. Photo: James St. John / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Interest turned commercial in the 1960s, when J. L. Mero's book Mineral Resources of the Sea assessed the prospects for mining them, and France, Germany and the United States sent research ships to look for deposits. Four multinational consortia, with partners from the US, Canada, the UK, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Japan, invested almost half a billion dollars over the 1960s and 1970s. Nickel was the main target. In the late 1970s two international joint ventures collected several hundred tonnes of nodules from about 5.5 kilometres down in the eastern equatorial Pacific.

A sponge among sediment-dusted manganese nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, photographed by GEOMAR's ROV KIEL 6000 in 2019. Photo: ROV KIEL 6000, GEOMAR / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

One ship from that era was a cover story. Howard Hughes told the press that his Hughes Glomar Explorer, built in 1971 and 1972, would lift manganese nodules from the ocean floor. In 1974 it recovered part of the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 for the CIA, a mission whose name, Project Azorian, became public only in 2010. In September 1978 the Ocean Minerals Company consortium leased the ship to test a prototype mining system, with Lockheed Missiles and Space Company as prime contractor. Metal prices then fell, nodule mining was nearly abandoned by 1982, and an estimated 650 million dollars spent from the 1960s to 1984 brought little return.

The Hughes Glomar Explorer at its dock in Long Beach, California, 1976. Photo: TedQuackenbush / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Collector robots and the US permit push today

Robots went back to the seabed in spring 2021. Global Sea Mineral Resources, the Belgian deep sea arm of DEME, drove its remotely controlled pre-prototype collector, Patania II, for 74 hours at more than 4,000 metres in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico. It travelled about 32 kilometres and harvested nodules over 54,000 square metres, the first test of its kind since the late 1970s. In 2022 Allseas, working with The Metals Company, ran integrated trials in the same zone, sending nodules 4.5 kilometres up a riser to its ship Hidden Gem. Allseas calls the 4,500 tonnes it brought in a record haul.

Furrows left by the 2021 Patania II nodule collection test, filmed during Ifremer's EDEN campaign in December 2024. Photo: Florian Besson and Pierre-Antoine Dessandier, Ifremer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

On 14 September 2026 US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told a G20 energy ministers' meeting in Houston that deep sea mining permits would come "within the next few months". An auction of two blocks off American Samoa is planned for November. The Metals Company has applied for a commercial recovery area of about 65,000 square kilometres, and with Allseas it aims to commission its vessel in the fourth quarter of 2027, using a system designed to recover 3 million wet tonnes of nodules a year. The International Seabed Authority is still negotiating its mining code. The United States has not joined the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and says it can issue permits beyond its own waters.

US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in his 2025 official portrait. Photo: US Department of the Interior via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB has no robot on the seabed, and no source links its robots to a nodule project. Its seabed experience is electrical. In a 100 million dollar joint industry project with Equinor, Total and Chevron that began in 2013, ABB developed a subsea power system for pumps and compressors, rated for 100 MW, water depths up to 3,000 metres and 600 kilometres of transmission, and lowered prototypes into Vaasa harbour for shallow water tests in 2019. The nodule fields are deeper. On the ship and ashore, robots are a possibility: samples have to be logged, split and analysed, as our post on the mineral assay lab describes, and a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot, which ABB builds to work beside people without fences, could do some of that work.

An ABB GoFa cobot with a gripper and camera at a lab bench. Photo: ABB

What comes next for nodule collector robots

The next collectors may be smaller and more selective. Impossible Metals says its Eureka system uses AI vision to scan the seabed, tells nodules apart from marine life and picks them up one at a time with robotic arms, leaving a large share untouched and creating no dredging or midwater plume. Picking single items by camera is routine in factories, where ABB's PickMaster software guides robots with 2D, 3D or colour vision; on the seabed it has to work under 4,000 metres of water. Mithril Minerals, picked for Breakthrough Energy's 2026 Fellows program in September, is building distributed robots that gently sweep up nodules and are launched from workboats instead of large drill ships.

A FlexPicker cell set up with ABB's PickMaster Lite software. Photo: ABB

For households, the link to nodules is the metal they contain. The International Energy Agency projects that critical mineral needs will roughly quadruple by 2040 on a net-zero path, a figure Impossible Metals cites, and Burgum framed the US push as securing a "diverse, secure, affordable supply of critical minerals". Factories come in once the nodules are ashore. The Metals Company holds exclusive rights to a site of nearly 1,500 acres at the Port of Brownsville, Texas, for a processing complex, and it can also use toll processing in Japan. If plants like that are built, sample handling and palletizing are jobs where ABB arms could fit, and such cells are usually planned first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 660 robot stacking bags of Lucchetti pasta on a pallet at Molinos in Argentina. Photo: Eduardo Gil / ABB

Scientists are still measuring what collectors do to the seabed. On 17 October 2026 the research ship SONNE left San Diego for 54 days in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, with 39 researchers from 17 institutions in seven European countries, to revisit the 2021 test site. Chief scientist Matthias Haeckel of GEOMAR said "Likely, we will not see any recovery", and that about 90 percent of the species his teams have sampled there are still unidentified. Cost is the other problem. Mithril's chief executive Anna Scott says conventional collection "costs billions in capital", and The Metals Company says it has spent about 700 million dollars so far, about 250 million of it on environmental research.

The research vessel SONNE in Hamburg, November 2014. Photo: Danapit / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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