Abstract—This paper presents sliding fractional order control for a single flexible link manipulator. This control strategy takes advantage the robustness of the fractional order control and the sliding mode technique. Fractional calculus is introduced to sliding mode control to design a fractional order sliding mode surface. Lyapunov theory is used to prove the asymptotical stability of the closed-loop system. The proposed controller is compared against the classical PD controller. The simulation results show that the proposed sliding fractional order has smaller error and more robustness comparing to the conventional PD control.