Most positioning systems experience residual vibration during operation. Such residual vibration can be eliminated or reduced to an acceptable level by using the input shaping method. However, adopting the input shaping methods typically introduces a certain amount of time-delay into a system. This study focused on the development of a delay-time adjustable input shaping method to eliminate vibration caused by repetitive motion in positioning systems. The proposed input shaping method, called the virtual mode (VM) input shaper, uses a virtual frequency parameter that adjusts delay-time and cancels residual vibration. Unlike most previous input shaping studies, this study investigated VM input shaping performance to eliminate the steady-state vibration induced by repetitive motion in positioning systems. To this end, an analytical formulation was derived and used for simulating the input shaping performance with varying dominant parameters involved in a system. Experiments were also performed to validate the proposed method.