Underwater glider (UG) is vital platform for ocean surveying, monitoring and exploration missions. Nevertheless, conventional UG is strongly underactuated with limited degrees of freedom and sluggish maneuver response, failing to meet rapid maneuvering requirements in complex ocean environments. Traditional submersibles adopt rigid hulls and propeller propulsion, which suffer from severe flow disturbance, poor agility and low concealment, making them unsuitable for high-precision, low-disturbance operation of UG. By contrast, bio-inspired propulsors relying on flexible deformation deliver superior maneuverability and hydrodynamic efficiency. The manta ray, with distinctive pectoral fin flapping, serves as an ideal bionic prototype for high-efficiency, highly maneuverable UGs. This paper develops a multi-fin flexible wing based on tensegrity structure to replicate key kinematics of manta ray pectoral fins and quantitatively analyzes its propulsive performance. Tank tests reveal that thrust and forward speed are highly dependent on flapping frequency, fin ray phase and flapping amplitude. The relationship curve between Strouhal number and propulsion efficiency is also plotted. The results verify that the proposed flexible tensegrity wing reproduces biological motion characteristics well and can remedy the maneuverability defects of traditional UG, showing promising application prospects for bionic propulsion of UG.

Underwater vehicles (UVs) are pivotal for ocean exploration, yet their effectiveness is fundamentally constrained by acoustic performance in noisy and dynamic seas. Self-noise, non-stationary interference, and extreme conditions not only degrade sensing, navigation, and stealth but also cascade into losses in propulsion efficiency, actuation reliability, and control precision. This review provides a system-performance-oriented synthesis of advances across four key areas: bioinspired and intelligent noise reduction materials/structures, active noise control and adaptive signal processing, noise-robust navigation and collaborative localization, and deep learning-enhanced acoustic perception. Key findings indicate that bioinspired surfaces reduce flow noise by ≈5 dB, adaptive filtering improves $\mathrm{SNR}$ by up to 20 dB, and distributed robust filtering ensures multi-AUV consistency under uncertainty. These developments collectively establish acoustic performance not as a parallel metric, but as a fundamental enabler and critical bottleneck for the integrated propulsion-actuation-control stack of next-generation UVs. Consequently, this review outlines viable pathways toward high-performance acoustic–mechanical integration.

Autonomous underwater glider fleets are increasingly deployed to observe mesoscale eddies, yet a methodology for evaluating observation quality under uncertainty remains lacking. This paper presents SCOPE, a framework integrating uncertainty propagation, multi-dimensional assessment, and objective metric selection. A 27-metric evaluation system spanning seven quality categories is constructed; an Adaptive Core Metric Selection (ACMS) algorithm compresses these to a compact core subset. Two-stage sensitivity analysis identifies the velocity ratio as the dominant parameter with a non-monotonic effect. The optimal velocity ratio decreases with eddy intensity in both an analytical model (0.58 to 0.47) and four real HYCOM eddies (2.35 to 0.35). ACMS converges on all four real eddies, and parameter rankings are consistent across environments. An ablation experiment in the analytical model validates the effectiveness of the two sensitivity-derived design rules (25% and 45.8%) gap closure and reveals their non-additive interaction. SCOPE offers a framework and diagnostic workflow for uncertainty-aware evaluation of autonomous ocean observation systems.

Autonomous underwater glider fleets are increasingly deployed to observe mesoscale eddies, yet a methodology for evaluating observation quality under uncertainty remains lacking. This paper presents SCOPE, a framework integrating uncertainty propagation, multi-dimensional assessment, and objective metric selection. A 27-metric evaluation system spanning seven quality categories is constructed; an Adaptive Core Metric Selection (ACMS) algorithm compresses these to a compact core subset. Two-stage sensitivity analysis identifies the velocity ratio as the dominant parameter with a non-monotonic effect. The optimal velocity ratio decreases with eddy intensity in both an analytical model (0.58 to 0.47) and four real HYCOM eddies (2.35 to 0.35). ACMS converges on all four real eddies, and parameter rankings are consistent across environments. An ablation experiment in the analytical model validates the effectiveness of the two sensitivity-derived design rules (25% and 45.8%) gap closure and reveals their non-additive interaction. SCOPE offers a framework and diagnostic workflow for uncertainty-aware evaluation of autonomous ocean observation systems.

Agile innovation is becoming increasingly important for complex mechatronic products. Existing studies often remain at the project management level and offer limited operational guidance for conceptual structural design. This paper proposes an agile innovation design method that integrates the Length–Time (LT) dimension and Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) to translate user feedback into engineering-oriented conceptual solutions. First, user pain points are organized into a fishbone-based functional model, and core problems are mapped to LT dimensions using a natural-language processing rule set. Second, a neural network trained on cases of technological evolution predicts the corresponding TRIZ evolution law. Third, structurally similar engineering cases are retrieved based on LT-dimensional similarity and transformed into conceptual schemes by structural mapping. Finally, the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution is used to rank alternative schemes with explicit normalization, distance calculation, and sensitivity checking. The method is demonstrated through the conceptual redesign of a vertical-axis wind turbine.