The double pendulum overhead crane system is a complex nonlinear system. In this paper, T-S fuzzy model is established for the double pendulum overhead crane system to describe the nonlinear characteristics of the controlled system. In order to reduce the influence of external disturbances and internal uncertainties on the control performance, a H ∞ controller for positioning and anti-swing of double pendulum overhead crane is proposed. The simulation results show that the proposed method can not only ensure the accurate positioning of the trolley, but also suppress the two-stage swing, and has good robustness and anti-disturbance performance.