Nowadays, Dynamic Positioning (DP) is applied to various tasks such as subsea pipeline laying and the requirements for the positioning performance in marine operations are higher and higher. The main objective of this paper is to design a DP controller based on the Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) to solve the problems of long response time, large overshoot and low positioning accuracy in ship positioning. Firstly, the mathematical models of the ship and environmental disturbances are established. Secondly, the basic principle of ADRC is described. Meanwhile, stability analysis of the control system is introduced. Thirdly, ADRC is improved by the fal function filter and phase prediction method which solve the problem of dither and phase delay in tracking differentiators. Finally, simulations are carried out to verify the performance of the designed ADRC and the improved ADRC. Several simulation results show that the designed ADRC can realize the fixed-point control of the ship, which effectively solves the problems of long response time, overshoot and positioning accuracy, and compared with the traditional ADRC, the improved ADRC can reduce the error of straight track control, which indicates that ADRC can meet the requirements for the positioning performance and has a strong application value.