Abstract: Compared to the traditional autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) with built-in sensors, the towing AUV plays an important role in observing small to medium-sized and rapidly evolving processes in deep-sea, with the advantages of low space limitation for measuring equipment, payload replacement convenience, and low self-interference. By reviewing the development status of towing AUV at home and abroad, the key technologies including overall design of AUV towing system, coupling dynamics analysis, automatic control, and intelligent decision-making strategies are analyzed with the characteristics of towing operations. Finally, this study emphasizes the specialization of towing vehicles and towed loads, and the networking of operation scenarios as research trends for towing AUV design and application, provides a valuable reference for incorporating towing AUVs into underwater high-precision detection.