OpenMantaClaus: Open-source ROS2 AUV wins 2nd place on $1K budget

OpenMantaClaus is a complete, budget-friendly autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) designed by independent developer Kushion for the Singapore Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Challenge (SAUVC). Despite costing a fraction of typical competition robots, it secured 2nd place against teams with far more expensive hardware. The entire autonomy stack runs on a Raspberry Pi with a Blue Robotics Navigator Flight Controller, and all vision processing happens through a single standard USB webcam.

Software-wise, the project is built on ROS 2 and extends the BlueOS ecosystem, using a forked BlueOS Extension to run containerized nodes for easy deployment and lifecycle management. Vision relies on custom YOLO-based object detection combined with classical computer vision techniques, all trained on a public Kaggle dataset the author released. Hardware uses low-cost Blue Robotics and ROVMaker components, and the full design is open source: code on GitHub, CAD on GrabCAD, and the YOLO dataset on Kaggle. It's an impressive proof that a small budget and clever engineering can compete at a high level.