Abstract In this paper, we investigate the problem of trajectory tracking control for marine surface vehicles (MSVs), which is subject to dynamic uncertainties, external disturbances and unmeasurable velocities. To recover the unmeasurable velocities, a novel adaptive neural network (NN) state observer is constructed. To guarantee the transient and steady-state tracking performance, a novel nonlinear transformation method is proposed by employing a tracking error transformation together with a newly constructed performance function, which is featured by user-defined settling time and tracking...