Aiming at the problems of nonlinear model, strong coupling, as well as model parameter uncertainty and external disturbance of workclass remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in path tracking process, a command filtered adaptive backstepping control strategy is proposed based on nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO). The NDO is used to observe the model uncertainty and external disturbance. The command filter is adopted to avoid directly computing the analytic derivative of the virtual control quantity. The unobservable disturbance is compensated with adaptive law. Lyapunov stability theory is used to prove the asympotic stability of the path tracking error system. The simulation experiment results show that the designed controller can achieve precise path tracking and has good robust characteristic.