Abstract. Human safety becomes critical when robot enters the human environment. Compliant control can be used to address some safety issues in human-robot physical interaction. This paper proposes an integral sliding mode controller (ISMC) based compliance control scheme for the Bristol Robotics Laboratory's humanoid BERT II robot arm. Apart from introducing a model reference compliance controller, the ISMC scheme is aimed to deal with the robot arm dynamic model's inaccuracies and un-modelled nonlinearities. The control scheme consists of a feedback linearization (FL) and an ISMC part. In addition, a posture controller has been incorporated to employ the redundant DOF and generate human like motion. The desired level of compliance can be tuned by selecting the stiffness and damping parameters in the sliding mode variable (compliance reference model). The results show that the compliant control is feasible at different levels for BERT II in simulation and experiment. The positioning control has been satisfactorily achieved and nonlinearities and un-modelled dynamics have been successfully overcome.