Acoustics-Driven Performance Enhancement in Underwater Vehicles: From Component Innovation to Intelligent Actuation

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 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.