Navigating a large university campus can be overwhelming, especially for new students, visitors, and even returning students attending classes in unfamiliar buildings. Finding lecture halls, administrative offices, laboratories, libraries, or student service centers often involves asking for directions or wasting valuable time.
To address this challenge, we built PathFindr—an AI-powered mobile campus navigation application designed to make navigating university campuses simple, intuitive, and accessible.
University campuses are often spread across multiple buildings with hundreds of classrooms, offices, and facilities. While popular mapping services provide general directions, they rarely include detailed campus information such as lecture halls, department offices, printing centers, or student service locations.
This creates unnecessary confusion, especially during the first few weeks of every academic session when thousands of new students are trying to find their way around campus.
PathFindr combines interactive campus maps, intelligent search, and conversational AI into a single mobile experience.
Instead of relying on static maps or asking strangers for directions, users can search for any campus location and receive clear navigation guidance directly from their phones.
We're also integrating Sarvam AI to power an intelligent Campus AI Guide. Rather than navigating through multiple menus, users will be able to ask questions naturally, such as:
The AI will understand user intent, answer campus-related questions, and provide contextual navigation assistance, making the experience more natural and accessible.
PathFindr is built using modern technologies that enable a fast, scalable, and cross-platform experience.
PathFindr follows a client-server architecture.
The mobile application is built with Expo and React Native, allowing us to deliver a high-quality native experience across Android and iOS from a single codebase.
The backend is built with Django and Django REST Framework, exposing REST APIs that manage campus locations, buildings, landmarks, search functionality, and other application data.
Google Maps powers the interactive map experience and routing, while Sarvam AI is being integrated to provide a conversational Campus AI Guide capable of understanding natural language questions and assisting users with campus navigation.
This modular architecture makes the application scalable and allows each component to evolve independently.
Building PathFindr presented several interesting challenges.
The first was designing a navigation experience that remains simple and intuitive despite the complexity of a university campus.
Another challenge was organizing campus data in a way that allows users to quickly discover buildings, departments, offices, and facilities without becoming overwhelmed.
We're also working on making AI responses contextual rather than generic, ensuring that the assistant understands campus-specific questions and provides useful, actionable guidance.
Finally, balancing interactive maps, intelligent search, and conversational AI within a clean mobile interface required careful attention to user experience and performance.
Expo has been instrumental in accelerating development by providing a smooth development workflow and access to native device capabilities without sacrificing developer productivity.
Its tooling allows us to rapidly build, test, iterate, and deploy a polished cross-platform mobile application while integrating features such as location services, navigation, and other native APIs essential to the PathFindr experience.
Our goal isn't simply to add a chatbot.
We're integrating Sarvam AI to create an intelligent campus assistant that understands natural language and helps users navigate campus more efficiently.
By combining AI with navigation, PathFindr becomes more than a map—it becomes a digital campus companion capable of answering questions, recommending locations, and guiding users through unfamiliar environments.
We're continuing to improve PathFindr with smarter navigation, richer campus information, enhanced search capabilities, and a more capable AI assistant.
Our vision is to make exploring a university campus as simple as asking a question.
Future improvements include:
PathFindr demonstrates how mobile technology and AI can work together to solve a real-world problem experienced by thousands of students every day.
By combining Expo's mobile capabilities with Sarvam AI's conversational intelligence, we're building a smarter, more accessible way to navigate university campuses.
We're excited to continue improving PathFindr and showcase it at HACKHAZARDS '26.