Advanced countries around the world are spurring the development of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) that can operate autonomously at marine environment. The key enabling technology for such USVs is the mission planning system (MPS) that can autonomously navigate through the harsh waters. The MPS not only has the functions for the navigation, but also has the capabilities, such as obstacle avoidance, malfunction corrections, dealing with unexpected events, return home functions, and many other eventualities that cannot be programmed in advance. The autonomy levels are increasingly moving higher and it is foreseeable that the trend will continue in the future. The main purpose of this paper is the analysis of the MPS onboard the USVs, in terms of the categories, functions, and technological details. Also, we analyze the case study of autonomous mission planning control systems in various fields and introduce the features that constitute the critical functionalities of the mission planning systems.