In order to reduce energy consumption under the premise of ensuring precision of the pipe handling manipulator’s hydraulic servo system, the state space model of the system was established and MATLAB’s lqr( ) was used to calculate the state feedback matrix of the minimal performance index of linear optimal quadratic. The matrix was supposed to be put into the virtual model for simulation, which was built by using Simulink, SimPowerSystems and Simhydraulics. The weighting matrix of the performance index was modified by comparing the simulation results and the satisfactory controller’s parameters were gotten. Simulation results show that the optimized controller not only meets the precision requirement, but also reduces the motor’s output power obviously.