To address the issue that unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are susceptible to external disturbances during recovery operations, which induce relative motion between the USV and the recovery cage and thereby degrade docking efficiency, a cable-driven active docking system for USVs was proposed. Docking performance was improved by synchronizing the lateral translation and vertical displacement of the recovery cage with those of the USV through controlled cable length adjustment. First, the kinematic and dynamic models of the proposed system were established and validated.Subsequently, a robust proportional-derivative (PD) control strategy incorporating cable velocity feedforward was developed. Finally, the feasibility of the docking scheme and the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy were verified through MATLAB/Simulink-Adams co-simulation. The results indicate that the introduction of fuzzy control logic significantly enhances system performance: compared with the conventional PD controller, the length and velocity errors of the main hoist cable are reduced by approximately 86% and 81%, respectively, while the traction cables exhibit average reductions of 84% in length error and 41% in velocity error. Furthermore, the relative positional errors between the USV and the recovery cage are reduced by 28% in the x-direction and 80% in the z-direction. The research results provide a theoretical foundation for the practical implementation of USV recovery systems and offer a reference for the development of advanced USV recovery apparatus.