SummaryWe develop a robust adaptive regulating control law for dynamically positioned ships subject to unknown dynamics and bounded unknown disturbances incorporating the radial basis function (RBF) neural network (NN), the dead zone adaptive technique, and a robust control term into the vectorial backstepping approach. The RBF NNs with the dead zone adaptive laws approximate the ship unknown dynamics. The adaptive law‐based robust control term compensates for unknown disturbances, NN approximation errors, and undesirable errors arising from the design procedures. The developed dynamic positioning (DP) control law regulates the ship position and heading to the desired values with arbitrarily small errors, while guaranteeing the uniform ultimate boundedness of all signals in the DP closed‐loop control system of ships. High‐fidelity simulations on two supply ships and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of the developed DP control law.