  The design of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and their docking
stations has been a popular research topic for several decades. Although many
AUV and dock designs have been proposed, materialized, and commercialized, most
of these existing designs prioritize the functionality of the AUV over the
dock, or vise versa; there has been limited formal research in analytical
optimization for AUV docking systems. In this paper, a multidisciplinary
optimization framework is presented with the aim to fill this theoretical gap.
We propose a co-design optimization method that optimizes multiple design
parameters governing the archetype of an AUV and its docking system. Capturing
the user design intents in the optimization process, the proposed method
produces a set of optimal design parameters that satisfies a set of predefined
bounds, constraints, and initial conditions. Three cases of design optimization
are reported for different design intents. Each optimal design found in the
three cases is compared to an existing system to show the validity of this
design optimization framework.
