TEKNOFEST Unmanned Underwater Systems 2025 — Finalist

About the competition

The TEKNOFEST Unmanned Underwater Systems Competition is part of TEKNOFEST, Türkiye’s national aerospace and technology festival, organised together with the T3 Foundation and the Ministry of Industry and Technology. Teams design and build an underwater vehicle and then run it through a task course in a pool, under the eyes of a technical jury.

The category is demanding for a simple reason: water is unforgiving. A sealing mistake is not a bug report, it is a flooded electronics bay. Every connector, every penetrator and every pressure housing has to be right before the vehicle is allowed near the course.

Teams are selected through written design reports before the final. TEKNOFEST competitions receive very large numbers of team applications, and only a small fraction of them are invited to the on-site final.

The result

Our team was selected as a finalist in the 2025 Unmanned Underwater Systems Competition. The final was held in İstanbul.

What the final stage involves

At the final, the vehicle is inspected before it is allowed to run. The jury checks the mechanical build, the electrical safety and the documentation, and asks the team to justify its design decisions. Only then does the vehicle go into the water for the task runs.

Preparing for that meant treating buoyancy, sealing and thruster layout as first-order problems rather than details to be fixed later, and keeping the control software simple enough to debug at the poolside.

The build itself is described in the linked project entry.