In order to utilize hydrodynamic drag force on articulated robots moving in an underwater environment, an optimum motion planning procedure is proposed. The drag force acting on cylindrical underwater arms is modeled and a directional drag measure is defined as a quantitative measure of reaction force in a specific direction in a workspace. A repetitive trajectory planning method is formulated from the general point-to-point trajectory planning method. In order to globally optimize the parameters of repetitive trajectories under inequality constraints, a 2-level optimization scheme is proposed, which adopts the genetic algorithm (GA) as the 1st level optimization and sequential quadratic programming (SQP) as the 2nd level optimization. To verify the validity of the proposed method, optimization examples of periodic motion planning with the simple two-link planner robot are also presented in this paper.