An adaptive tracking controller is presented for the vibration reduction of flexible manipulator employed in hazardous area by combining input shaping technique with sliding-mode control. The combined approach appears to be robust in the presence of severe disturbance and unknown parameter which will be estimated by least-square method in real time. In a maneuver strategy, it is found that a hybrid trajectory with a combination of low frequency mode and rigid-body mode results in better performance and is more efficient than the traditional rigid body trajectory alone which many researchers have employed. The feasibility of the adaptive tracking control approach is demonstrated by applying it to the simplified model of robot system. For the applications of the proposed technique to realistic systems, several requirements are discussed such as control stability and large system order resulted from finite element modeling.