SAUVC celebrated another successful year with its 10th edition held during 14-17 March 2025. Continuing its trend of growth, this year's event hit new records in team registration and participation, reinforcing its position as the largest SAUVC to date. The event was endorsed by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Sciences, emphasizing its alignment with global initiative goals, notably addressing five of its ten challenges. This endorsement also underscores the critical role of IEEE OES in the Decade's framework.

A new addition to this event was a full-day marine robotics hands-on workshop exclusively for high-school students, conducted on 13th March. This initiative aimed to enhance marine robotics education at the school level and inspire students towards careers in this field. This plan to synergize the events worked out successfully, and further details will be covered in a separate article.

SAUVC in numbers

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  Teams being given briefings on the event in a fully packed hall

  Registration: 83 teams registered for the event. These teams had to prequalify for participation by submitting a video of their AUV swimming underwater, with a requirement that the video should show it swimming for at least 10s and demonstrating their AUV’s depth control. The requirements were made more stringent this year considering how team videos have been getting better in previous years, limiting the video length strictly to a minute and with must-meet requirements.
• Participation: 73 teams participated by submitting videos as part of pre-qualification requirements.
• Selected: 51 teams were selected from these to attend the event in Singapore. All the videos were of very high quality, even better than last year. Even given the clear and strict criteria, the judging team had a hard time shortlisting the teams.
• Competed: 41 of the selected teams made it into the event, which again, is the highest ever for the event. Some teams could not make it due to technical or financial issues mostly. Students in the region (especially South Asia) often develop their AUVs on tight budgets and do not necessarily find the funds to travel so far for the event. Nevertheless, despite the travel, visa and funding issues, it is impressive that so many teams made it.
• ~440 participants made it to the event in total including students and their mentors, from
• 13 countries (India, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Russia, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Macau, Australia and Azerbaijan). This year, we had the first ever teams from Azerbaijan and Australia participating at the event, and the second-ever team from Saudi Arabia, thus extending our reach now to Central Asia and the Pacific ! Needless to say, both teams were elated to be here.
• 2 school teams - one from Alana Science High school, Turkey, which is a recurring team from last year, as well as a team from Pui Ching Middle School, Macau.

We had the highest participation yet in this event, and this was clear in terms of how the venue was packed throughout the event (see the header photo!). The representation of teams from developing countries across Asia was extensive, and shows the value that SAUVC brings to this region.

The Challenge

SAUVC 2025 maintained the challenges from the previous year, including an underwater communication task to promote teams to think about this important technological problem. However, the TCOMS Ocean basin facility bonus round with waves and currents was omitted due to logistical issues.

The competition involved a qualification and a final round. To qualify, AUVs navigated through a gate without surfacing or contacting any structures. The top 20 teams moved to the finals, where they completed tasks to assess their capabilities in navigation, positioning, actuation, communication, and robotic manipulation. The table below outlines the various functional capabilities tested in the corresponding tasks.

 

Task	Aspect of operation
Passing through a gate, avoiding red flare	Navigation, Obstacle avoidance
Locating a particular bucket amongst 4 options, and dropping a ball into it	Target acquisition and manipulation, Acoustic/Visual localization
Moving out of the bucket arena, returning and reacquiring the ball dropped.	Target reacquisition and manipulation
Bumping against a flare holding a ball to drop it, in a particular order	Underwater communication and Visual Localization

Points were awarded based on task difficulty, timing, and AUV specifications. A complete description of the tasks, static judging criteria and award of points are covered in the competition rule book available at https://sauvc.github.io/rulebook/.

SAUVC 2025 Award Winners

This year, there were 20 finalist teams. The winner of SAUVC 2025 was Team Mecatron from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, who were runner-up in the previous edition, showing notable improvement from the previous year. Due to close scoring, a joint runners-up award was presented to the next two teams.

Top 5 teams in the finals:

1. Mecatron from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore,
2. HYDROships from Shipbuilding Institute of Polytechnic Surabaya, Indonesia,
3. Nirma AUV from Nirma University, Ahmedabad, India,
4. Marine Belido from Universitas Multi Data Palembang Palembang, Indonesia,
5. Searious Business from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

A general observation is that Indonesian teams showed remarkable improvement this year. However, overall performance was not significantly better than 2024, as only two teams hit the flares, and none succeeded in underwater communication.

In addition to the top 3 finalists, the IEEE OES innovation award went to Team Manta Ray from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. This was judged by a panel consisting of the SAUVC technical committee, and included inputs from external judges (Dr. Daniel Tan from Marine Ports Authority), the divers who observed the AUVs, and Dr. Pallayil did a walk-about talking to the teams. The Manta Ray AUV turned quite some eyes with their simplistic design using a transparent and inexpensive cat bowl hull to house the electronics, a simulator developed in Minecraft to test the AUV, and a Macbook mini as the computer inside their vehicle (they also had a schematic showing that the overall cost of the system was manageable despite the Macbook used, and they were even ready to throw their AUV into the pool!) . The AUV ranked a joint 6th in the overall competition.

Gala Dinner, Award Ceremony and Panel discussion

The event concluded with a gala dinner and award announcement at the Shaw Foundation Alumni House on March 17th. This ceremony celebrated achievements, facilitated networking, and included exciting technical talks from marine engineering experts including Dr. Daniel Tan from Marine Ports Authority Singapore, and Mr. Raj Nagalingam from the Society for Underwater Technology. Additionally, a video showcasing Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor Too and the OES Berths of Opportunity program was presented.

Event publicity and social outreach

This year’s event saw an even more concerted social media campaign over Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, being well-covered in terms of photos and videos. Our Facebook and Instagram handles showed a reach of 16k and 68k respectively, and Linkedin showed 47k impressions over January to April alone. There were 77k and 428k views over the last 3 months. The posts reached a diverse audience, mainly from South Asia, Indonesia, Turkey, U.S., and Singapore.

IEEE OES has always been a regular sponsor of SAUVC in terms of sponsorship, as it was in this year. Other sponsors included Schmidt Ocean Institute, Sonardyne, IEEE TryEngineering STEM grant, Kongsberg Discovery, Society for Underwater technology, BlueRobotics, Sea and Land Technology and Breaking the Surface 2025. 

Concluding Remarks and success stories

SAUVC has established itself as a leading and prominent student competition for autonomous underwater vehicles across Asia, Australia, and Europe over its ten editions. It has garnered considerable interest within the student robotics community and has had a tangible impact on student learning and ocean education outcomes. Previous SAUVC winners have gone on to join marine robotics labs and/or industry jobs worldwide, which is a matter of pride for us.

The competition's policy of no registration fees aims to encourage broad participation, particularly from developing nations, and supports educational outreach by facilitating interactions with experts and mentors. This policy aims to encourage novice teams to compete, with OES membership drives conducted as part of the registration process, and we once again thank our sponsors for supporting this. The substantial representation in terms of participating countries, number of students, and diversity is deemed encouraging. This approach supports the growth of marine robotics interests globally and fosters innovation among young engineers. The event's educational outreach extends beyond competition, as participants gain invaluable hands-on experience and mentorship from marine robotics experts and committee members.

SAUVC's commitment to nurturing talent is evident in the success stories of former participants - at least four marine robotics-based startups have originated from teams participating in SAUVC. These include BeeX in Singapore (from team Bumblebee), BRACU (from the Bangladesh-based BRACU Duburi team), Tiburon from the National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India. Teams from Nirma Institute of Technology and Christ College of Engineering are also undertaking R&D projects in India. Another success story we have learnt is that many of these winners have gone on to win other competitions like RoboSub, showcasing how the learning experience at SAUVC fostered their growth, and more SAUVC winners are eyeing other competitions as well.

Overall, SAUVC continues to serve as a pivotal platform for fostering marine robotics education and innovation, leveraging its extensive reach and support from sponsors to create lasting impacts in the field. The event's continuous growth and success highlight its significance as a catalyst for student learning and technological advancement in underwater vehicle systems.