Compliance of the collaborative robots plays an important role in human-robot interaction. Due to the complex nonlinearities caused by the compliance, and parameter uncertainties, good performance control method for the compliant collaborative robot is always a challenging task. Therefore, to overcome the challenge of the compliance, and uncertain dynamics, this paper develops an adaptive passive admittance control (APAC) approach for a novel compliant collaborative robot, whose compliant mechanism is constituted of the inerters, springs, and dampers. First, through force-current analogy between mechanical network and electrical network, the compliance of the proposed collaborative robot with the inerters, springs, and dampers, is represented by a novel and simplified admittance matrix to facilitate dynamics model of the proposed collaborative robot. Then, for the proposed compliant collaborative robot, an APAC strategy is presented to dispose of the uncertain parameters of the dynamics. The inertial matrix, Coriolis matrix, admittance matrix, and gravity vector of the compliant collaborative robot are expressed as linear representation of orthogonal basis functions by using function approximation technique (FAT). The boundedness of the robot dynamics is proved by detailed stability analysis which uses Lyapunov function. Finally, simulation results indicate that the proposed APAC of the compliant collaborative robot is effective.