When Electro-Optical Tracking System (EOTS) is working in a low-speed tracking state, the nonlinear friction torque between shafts of the EOTS may cause “flat-top” or “creeping” phenomenon, and also decrease the angular resolution and repeatability precision, which has a great influence on tracking precision. A friction modeling and compensation method based on Genetic Algorithm(GA) is proposed to solve the problem. Firstly, GA is adopted to model a Stribeck nonlinear friction of the EOTS to obtain a higher degree of model fitting and reduce the fitting error of the friction model. Then, a feedforward compensation is made to the identified friction, and thus to reduce the effect of the nonlinear friction torque on the EOTS.Results in simulation and physical experiments show that the proposed scheme is effective in friction compensation, which can improve the control performance of the EOTS.