Autonomous underwater vehicles play an essential role in geophysical data collection, deep water mining, seafloor mapping, ocean exploration, and in many other related activities starting from military to scientific applications. A detailed understanding of hydrodynamic characteristics will lead to better design, better control, and optimal path planning of autonomous underwater vehicles in the deepest corner of oceans. This article will provide a detailed review of the hydrodynamic characteristics of autonomous underwater vehicles, starting from different experimental techniques used in the analysis of hydrodynamic parameters, methods used for fixing the autonomous underwater vehicles in towing tank, instruments used for measurement of the hydrodynamic parameters. Furthermore, numerical methods employed in performing computational analysis, hydrodynamics-based shape optimization, studies on drag reduction, and finally a detailed list of turbulence models used in the computational fluid dynamics–related numerical simulations. The hydrodynamics-based optimal shape of the autonomous underwater vehicles, the best technique to predict the hydrodynamic parameters, and the best turbulence model for the computational fluid dynamics–based prediction of hydrodynamic parameters will be recommended. At last, the hydrodynamic characteristics of different bio-inspired autonomous underwater vehicles are discussed.
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