A study of embedded motion control was conducted to solve the difficulties in design of a control system for an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) caused by the facts that an USV is a strongly nonlinear, uncertain system and its accurate mathematical model is difficult to establish. An embedded motion control system for a certain single water-jet-propelled USV was designed. The architecture of the embedded motion control system was constructed from the aspects of hardware and software. To satisfy the real-time and reliability of data processing of the embedded control system, a α-β-γ filter was incorporated into the S surface controller. The results of the sea trial and the lake trial showed that the proposed controller together with the filter can provide good control performance, and the feasibility and reliability of the embedded control system were also verified.