## 1 Introduction  
The development of autonomous vessels and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) has generated a significant amount of research due to their potential applications in the naval sector and the maritime, fluvial, and lacustrine industries as well as in studies associated with environmental monitoring. Additionally, the development of these types of systems involves addressing aspects related to route planning, navigation systems, automatic control, object and environment recognition, communications, safety, and regulation. According to [1], the growth period of studies related to autonomous and unmanned surface vehicles began in 2010 with a substantial increase in recent years. Although previous advances in aerial and ground vehicles have provided a fundamental basis for the development of USVs, there are various challenges linked to the particularities of the different types of vehicles as well as to the complexity of the environments, contexts, and applications [2]. Numerous studies have contributed to the field of USVs, covering topics including literature reviews, bibliometric analysis, applications, vessel design, GNC system development, communications, risk management, cooperative systems, and regulatory and normative frameworks. This work has been developed within the framework of the project \"BERCO--Development of a boat focused on remote-controlled electromobility for the transport of logistic supplies from TRL 3 to TRL 5, as a strategy to validate the functionality of charging stations that use second-life batteries\", which is part of the program \"TULATO--Technologies for the adoption of efficient energy and mobility systems that promote sustainable development oriented towards regions with high biosocial and energy potential such as Tumaco, Narino\". Our hypothesis is that most of the research and industry efforts on USVs are concentrated on maritime, military, and commercial applications. This study seeks to explore the development of USVs for civilian use in confined environments, especially rivers. The main objective of this work is to identify the evolution of studies related to USVs, focusing on advancements in algorithms for achieving USV autonomy and the applications related to small craft, to guide the development of future USV technologies for the specific context of interest. The autonomy capabilities of the USV are highly dependent on the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) architecture. While several literature reviews on USVs focus on specific subsystems or task, a comprehensive mapping of the entire GNC architecture remains lacking. Our review aims to address this gap. The review works presented in [1,3] are mainly focused on the bibliometric analysis of the identified documents. The authors present the main topics of the state of the art and establish future research directions based on the analysis performed. In our work, in addition to bibliometric analysis, the collected information is organized in such a way that it is possible to map the selected works within the framework of the GNC architecture. In addition, while the work presented in [4] focuses on civilian USV applications in disaster management, our study presents a wider range of both civilian and military applications. To achieve the goals of this research, the study is developed based on the following research questions:  
RQ1: What has been the evolution of studies on unmanned surface vehicles regarding the applications and the achievement of autonomous capabilities? RQ2: What are the general areas in the civil and military fields in which unmanned surface vehicles are used? RQ3: What types of algorithms have been the subject of research for achieving unmanned surface vehicles autonomy? The main contributions made in this work, achieved through the development of these three research questions, are the following:  
* A perspective of the evolution of USV studies is presented based on the information obtained with the bibliometrix analysis tool.