Abstract: The formation tracking control problem of multiple unmanned surface vehicles with model uncertainties and actuator faults is studied. A set of fully distributed observers is designed for the following unmanned surface vehicles through online information exchange to estimate the desired position, course, velocity, and a command-filtered backstepping control protocol is proposed. The results show that the practical exponential stability of closed-loop error systems and the formation tracking of unmanned surface vehicles can be achieved. One advantage of the proposed control method lies in that it does not depend on the spectral information of the Laplacian matrix of the communication topology graph so that the proposed control protocol can be implemented in a fully distributed architecture. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol is verified through simulations and experiments.