The position control accuracy of a robot arm is significantly deteriorated when a long arm robot is operated at a high speed. In this case, the robot arm must be modeled as a flexible structure, not a rigid one, and its control system should be designed with its elastic modes taken into account. In this paper, the tip position control scheme of a one-link flexible manipulator using 2-DOF controller with sliding mode is presented. The robot consists of a flexible arm manufactured with a thin aluminium plate, an AC servo motor with a harmonic drive for speed reduction, an optical encoder and a CCD camera as a vision sensor for on-line measuring the tip deflection of the flexible m. Simulation and experimental results of the flexible manipulator with a proposed controller are provided to show the effectiveness of the controller.