Bengaluru · Computer Science, NMIT

Nikhil A V

I build systems that have to work in the real world: vehicle-to-vehicle networks, offline mesh radios, drone detection, and the developer tools I needed along the way. Co-founder of DriveLink, with six top finishes at hackathons in 2026.

Results 2026

1st
Pariyavaran Hackathon · MSRIT Bengaluru
Sep 2026
Smart irrigation (PS 2.2): ESP32 field sensors with a FastAPI backend that decides when to water. ₹50,000 prize.
1st
ADHD Hacks · Claude Community, Bengaluru
Sep 2026
SOMA, a quiet web app for noticing what your body is feeling and naming the “parts” behind it: interactive body map, 3D body studio, FastAPI and vector search. Built with team Bubble Tea. $350 prize.
AIR 5
Blueprint · eDC, IIT Delhi
2026
DriveLink, pitched through the semi-final at MIT Bengaluru.
4th
HackSurgeX · NMIT, 36 hours
Apr 2026
DriveLink, with a patent grant option. I pitched to the judges.
Top 5
iQOO Hackathon
Jun 2026
ChalkMark turns lecture audio and blackboard photos into notes, quizzes and flashcards, with Gemma 3n and Whisper running entirely on the phone.
Top 10
Google DeepMind Hackathon · Bangalore
Jul 2026
CHOWKI, an offline mesh network for mountain trail safety booths.

Selected work

DriveLink

Co-founder · 2026

Vehicle-to-vehicle intelligence: cars that negotiate lane changes and merges with each other instead of guessing. Now being incorporated as DriveLink V2V Intelligence LLP.

  • drivelink.tech runs a live V2V traffic simulation in the browser: car-following, negotiated lane changes, on-ramp merges.
  • RandomForest models decide when a car should merge, change lanes or wait. They drive a Godot highway sim live over WebSockets, and the same models are validated inside the SUMO traffic simulator.
  • DriveLink Connect: a Flutter app that lets anyone reach a car's owner by scanning a QR tag, without sharing phone numbers. Includes crash SOS.
Next.js · Flutter · Supabase · Godot · scikit-learn · SUMO · WebSockets

Arvyo

Bharatiya Antariksh Hackathon

When a star dims, something crossed it: a planet, an eclipsing binary, a blended background star, or a starspot. Arvyo rebuilds all four from physics, fits each to the TESS or Kepler light curve, and reports which one the evidence prefers, with the reason attached.

11 standalone repos · BLS/TLS period search · CNN encoder · pixel-level localisation · source

assay

Hacker House Goa 2026

An agent that investigates fraud alerts on a TigerGraph transaction graph and writes a case file, with the graph query behind every claim. Its model is trained only on the bank's closed cases and tested on a month it never saw: AUC 0.964 against the bank's own risk score at 0.866.

TigerGraph · GSQL · Python · replay · source

CHOWKI

Google DeepMind Hackathon

A delay-tolerant network for mountain trail booths with no internet and no signal. Hikers carry ledger snapshots between booths over Bluetooth, acting as data mules. A local Gemma model parses incident reports and flags overdue hikers.

Flutter · BLE · SQLite · Gemma via Ollama · TypeScript

Drone detection

Computer vision

A YOLO11 drone detector I trained with an extra small-object detection head for distant targets. 0.915 mAP50 on validation and 131 FPS inference. It is the camera channel of AURA, a high-altitude counter-drone prototype.

PyTorch · YOLO11 · CUDA

flowtype

Offline voice typing

Press a hotkey, talk, and clean text appears at your cursor in any app. Speech recognition runs on the GPU with Whisper, a small local model removes filler words, and nothing leaves the laptop.

faster-whisper · Ollama · Linux, Wayland · source

Friction Heatmap

Research project

A VS Code extension that measures which lines of code are hard to understand by watching how people hesitate: dwell time, revisits, pauses before editing. The question it tests: does human hesitation predict bugs better than code complexity metrics?

TypeScript · VS Code API · Python analysis

Open source all public on GitHub

hoistOne command puts a local app on a public HTTPS URL, with a QR code.
replayrRecord HTTP, SSE and WebSocket traffic once, then demo with the backend off.
jitterFinds which source of randomness makes a test flaky and prints a 10-out-of-10 repro.
strataRanks risky files by complexity times git churn and finds hidden change coupling.
carveShrinks a failing repo to the smallest set of lines that still fails the same way.
veinRecords what Python code actually runs, and diffs two runs.
leverGives any command-line tool a web UI by reading its --help.
cairn / roamA Blender file becomes a walkable multiplayer web page at a URL, in one command.
sigilFace photo to live social search to a tamper-evident record on a blockchain.
prism-labClaude agents form hypotheses about a room, measure it with laptop sensors, and try to disprove each other.
Indian-stock-MCPNSE and BSE prices, history and market news as tools for AI assistants.
auraCounter-drone prototype with an altitude-compensated tracking model.

Skills and education

Focus: AI agent orchestration, edge AI on embedded hardware, delay-tolerant mesh networking, ultrasonic acoustic sensing, computer vision.
Languages: Python, TypeScript, Dart, C++, R.
Tools: PyTorch, Flutter, Next.js, FastAPI, Supabase, TigerGraph, n8n, Ollama, MCP, ESP32, Blender, Linux, Docker.

B.E., Computer Science and Engineering
Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology, Bengaluru