SUMMARY Impedance control is one of the interaction and force control methods that has been widely applied in the research of robotics. In this paper, a new position-based fractional-order impedance control scheme is proposed and applied to a 2 DOF serial manipulator. An RR robot manipulator with full arm dynamics and its environment were designed using Matlab/Simulink. The position control of the manipulator was utilized based on computed torque control to cancel out the nonlinearities existing on the dynamic model of the robot. Parameters of classical impedance controller (CIC) and proposed fractional-order impedance controller (FOIC) were optimized in order to minimize impact forces for comparison of the results in three conditions. In CIC condition: three constant parameters of the impedance controller were optimized: in Frac_λμ condition: Only non-integer parameters of the FOIC were re-optimized after the parameters in CIC had been accepted, and in Frac_all condition: all parameters of the FOIC were re-optimized. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, simulations were conducted for all cases and performance indices were computed for the interaction forces. Results showed that impacts were reduced with an improvement of 26.12% from CIC to Frac_ λμ and an improvement of 47.21% from CIC to Frac_all. The proposed scheme improves the impedance behavior and robustness showing better impact absorption performance, which is needed in many challenging robotic tasks and intelligent mechatronic devices.