In the double-pendulum rotary crane case, the load sway properties become more complicated so that the difficulty of design and analysis of crane control system is increased. Moreover, the change of rope length not only affects the stability of the system, but also leads to the decline of control performance. In order to solve the foregoing problems, a simple model for controller design is obtained by linearizing and decoupling the complex nonlinear model of rotary crane. Then, a linear feedback controller which can furnish robust performance is presented. Finally, numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing with a traditional approach.