I'm Dhruv. 16, Nashua NH, and I've basically been building things my whole life. Started with robotics when I was five, haven't really stopped since.
Aerospace is where most of my energy goes — autonomous systems specifically. I like the idea of machines that can think for themselves, adapt, and operate without someone holding their hand the whole time. SWARM is the biggest thing I'm working on right now. There's also Micromouse, a club I started at my school that somehow turned into something real.
But it's not just aerospace. I care about building things that actually matter — whether that's a drone system, a product, or a low-cost device that could help someone. I want to work on things that leave a mark. That's kind of the whole point for me.
Outside of all that — music, philosophy, history, competition. I think a lot about purpose and identity, probably more than most people my age. I can go from extremely locked in to completely burnt out, but either way my brain keeps running. That's just how it goes.
Whether it's a research opportunity, engineering collaboration, or just a conversation about autonomous systems and aerospace — reach out. I'm always interested in working on things that push the field forward.
If you're building something interesting, I'm down to hear about it. Research, collaboration, or just a good conversation — reach out.
SWARM started from a pretty simple frustration — most drone systems are built around specialized hardware. You design a scout drone, a relay drone, a sensor drone. If one fails, it fails. The whole architecture is fragile by design.
The idea behind SWARM is that every single node is identical hardware. Same motors, same compute, same sensors. What makes them different is software — roles like Scout, Anchor, Intel, Lift, Pulse, and Sentinel get assigned dynamically by a distributed AI system depending on what the swarm actually needs in that moment.
If a node's battery drops, it hands off its role automatically. If one goes offline entirely, the remaining nodes redistribute and keep running. No central controller means no single point of failure.
Getting the decentralized role negotiation to actually work is the bulk of the challenge. Each node has to be aware of the swarm's state, make decisions locally, and reach consensus with the others — all in real time, all without a central brain telling them what to do. That's what I'm deep in right now.
Micromouse is a robotics competition where you build a small autonomous robot that navigates a maze as fast as possible — no remote control, no human input once it starts. It has to map the maze, find the optimal path, and run it. Classic problem, genuinely hard to do well.
I started this club at Nashua High School South because nobody else was doing it and I thought it was one of the best ways to actually learn embedded systems and autonomous navigation. Not in a theoretical way — you build something, it breaks, you figure out why, you fix it.
In the first year we got 50+ students coming in person and a few hundred more following along online. I didn't expect it to grow that fast. We teach PID control, sensor integration, maze-solving algorithms — the real stuff, not watered down.
My personal Micromouse build. Still a work in progress, but the goal is to build something competitive — not just functional. Custom PCB, optimized firmware, tuned PID. Every iteration gets a little faster.
I started making videos because a lot of the engineering content online is either too basic or buried behind paywalls and academic jargon. I wanted to explain things the way I wish someone had explained them to me — clearly, without dumbing it down.
The channel covers robotics, embedded systems, autonomous navigation, and whatever else I'm working on at the time. The goal was never to go viral. It was to make content that's actually useful for students who are trying to learn this stuff seriously.
Somehow it reached people in countries I've never been to. That part still feels kind of unreal to me. If even a few of those people built something because of a video I made, that's worth more than any view count.