Aiming at the problem of heading control of water-jet propulsion type Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) in the horizontal plane, an improved terminal sliding mode control method is proposed.Firstly, the Norrbin model of USV is established.Based on this model, a heading controller based on terminal sliding mode control is designed.At the same time, in order to alleviate the chattering problem brought by sliding mode control, the Sigmoid function is introduced for improving the traditional exponential approaching rate, and the stability of the control system is proved by the Lyapunov method.After that, the correctness of the control algorithm is verified by Matlab simulation experiment.The “Haiyao 01” independently developed by our research group has been used for carrying out a real ship experiment on the lake for the designed heading tracking control algorithm.The experimental results verify the feasibility of the algorithm in practical engineering.