SummaryThis paper investigates the control of a single‐link flexible robot manipulator with a tip payload appointed to rotate about 2 perpendicular axes in space. The control objective is to regulate the rigid body rotation of the manipulator with guaranteeing the stability of its vibration in the presence of exogenous disturbances. To achieve this, a Lyapunov‐based control design procedure is used and accomplished in some steps. First, the partial differential equation (PDE) dynamic model governing the rigid‐flexible hybrid motion of the arm is derived by applying Hamilton's principle. Next, based on the developed PDE model, an adaptive robust boundary control is established using the Lyapunov redesign approach. To this end, an adaptation mechanism is proposed so that the robust boundary control gains are dynamically updated online and there is no need for prior knowledge of disturbance upper bounds. The actuators and sensors are fully implemented at the arm boundary without using distributed actuators or sensors. Furthermore, in order to avoid control errors resulting from the spillover, control design is directly based on infinite‐dimensional PDE model without resorting to model truncation. Simulation results illustrate the efficacy of the considered method.