SPINDLE: Engineering A Safer Way Into The World's Most Dangerous Mines - Rohan Manchanda

SPINDLE took shape around a problem Rohan Manchanda felt compelled to solve. During two consecutive summers in the Jharia coal belt, he investigated mine safety as the only high school intern selected for the National Centre for Coal and Energy Research.

What Rohan encountered there changed the way he thought about engineering.

Across more than 15 active collieries, he examined how mines kept air circulating, detected methane buildup, controlled fires, and prepared workers to evacuate during an emergency. The work brought him alongside geological-survey teams and disaster-response personnel during rescue drills and emergency simulations. Jharia was not an abstract research environment. With 68 active underground fires in the region, the consequences of inadequate safety systems were immediate and tangible.

One problem stayed with him: rescue teams sent underground to reach trapped miners often had little reliable information about the conditions ahead. Collapsed passages could conceal unstable structures; methane could accumulate, oxygen levels could fall, and smoke and darkness could obscure the route. Every delay mattered, yet moving forward meant risking another life.

Rohan began wondering whether the first person into such an environment had to be a person at all.

That question became SPINDLE, a hybrid legged-wheeled mine-rescue and inspection robot designed to gather critical information before human rescuers enter hazardous underground spaces. The design was driven by the realities Rohan had observed in the field. A conventional wheeled robot could move efficiently across relatively predictable surfaces, but collapsed mines are rarely predictable. Debris, uneven ground, and narrow passages can make conventional mobility difficult. So Rohan gave SPINDLE both wheels and legs. The wheels help it cover distance quickly, while the jointed legs let it climb over obstacles and pick its way across rough ground.

He then built the sensing architecture around another fundamental challenge: rescuers need to know not simply where the robot is, but what is happening around it. SPINDLE incorporates methane and oxygen sensing, LiDAR, thermal imaging, and structural-assessment capabilities. Together, these systems allow the platform to investigate environmental and structural conditions that would otherwise have to be assessed by a human entering the mine.

But Rohan did not stop at making SPINDLE technically capable. His field experience had taught him another lesson: a technology is not genuinely useful if the people who need it cannot afford it.

Commercial mine-rescue robots can carry enormous costs, making them difficult to deploy widely in mining regions where safety needs are greatest. Rohan consequently treated affordability as an engineering constraint. By redesigning the manufacturing and system architecture, he developed SPINDLE at approximately 85% below the cost of comparable commercial alternatives.

That decision captures something important about his approach to innovation. He was not trying to build the most technologically extravagant robot possible. He was trying to build something that could realistically reach a mine.

Getting there required more than assembling a prototype. Rohan subjected SPINDLE to field testing at an operating Jharia colliery under disaster-response supervision, taking the system into the environment for which it had been designed. The experience also forced him to confront the difference between laboratory performance and real-world reliability. Underground environments contain variables that are difficult to reproduce in controlled testing: unpredictable terrain, dust, heat, confined spaces, and structural conditions that change from one location to another.

Rather than treating these complications as inconveniences, Rohan incorporated them into his engineering process.

He sought feedback from mining professionals and frontline workers, and during technical discussions with experienced engineers and safety inspectors, he was careful to distinguish between capabilities that had been validated and those still requiring further testing. That intellectual honesty became as important as the technology itself. SPINDLE was not presented as a magical solution to mine safety; it was presented as an evolving system whose effectiveness had to be established through evidence.

The project subsequently secured a patent, earned the CREST Gold Award, and was selected for presentation at the Sigma Xi International Research Conference. It also entered formal consideration for further field-deployment evaluation. Rohan was ultimately recognised with the Government of India’s Youth Changemaker honour for his mine-safety innovation.

Yet the most meaningful outcome of SPINDLE may not be the patent or the awards. It is the shift in perspective that produced it.

Rohan entered the mines as a student interested in engineering and emerged with a deeper understanding of what engineering is supposed to accomplish. He learned that designing for a real environment means listening to the people who work there, understanding the constraints they face, and refusing to separate technical performance from human consequences.

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