In order to suppress the vibration of rotating flexible manipulator caused by external disturbance, a rigid-flexible manipulator experimental platform is designed and constructed, with a rigid upper arm and a flexible forearm. Vibration signals are measured by utilizing the piezoelectric ceramic patch pasted at the root surface of the flexible arm, and the manipulator is driven by using an alternating current (AC) serve motor with a reducer. Then, a feed-forward control scheme based on input shaping technology (IST) and a feedback control scheme designed by generalized minimum variance self-tuning controller (GMVSTC) are designed, and the corresponding experiments are conducted. To verify the effectiveness of the control schemes, the capability of the controllers are evaluated in terms of vibration reduction compared with the experimental results under proportion differentiation (PD) control. The experimental results demonstrate that the input shaping and self-tuning controller can largely reduce the vibration time of the flexible arm. Thus, the vibration of the flexible arm can be rapidly suppressed.