The rotary crane is known to be a class of nonholonomic systems which is hard to control by classical methods. The crane system has inherently nonlinear characteristics. In this paper, we propose a feedback controller with an embedded nonlinear compensator for the rotary crane system. For the nonlinear compensation, we use a hyperbolic function and some coefficients. Determinations of the feedback gains and the compensator coefficients are difficult. In this paper, we apply GA optimization to determine the sets of parameters of the controller.