The design and construction of special purpose vessels such as drillship and shuttle tankers have been increased. These vessels install the DPS(dynamic positioning systems) to maintain the position and heading for long-time operation. This paper deals with the experimental method for model-based DP system and the control theory and filter algorithms. In this experiment, the length of model ship is 4 meters and it has three thrusters to maintain the position. The ability of tracking along the given course and keeping of heading in waves are confirmed. For the calculation of thruster input the PID control theory are adopted and the effects of PID gain were investigated. To estimate the low frequency motions Kalman filter and digital filter were used and their effects were investigated.