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Modern robots are increasingly being designed to collaborate with human, and the safety of human-robot interaction has become more significant than ever. Series elastic actuator (SEA) is a potential actuator system in force control for various robotic applications with inherent safe property. However, achieving the good performances of SEA torque control especially with unknown load-side dynamics is still challenging. In this article, a high performance decoupled torque controller is proposed to control the SEA as an ideal torque source that is suitable for various application scenarios. A more general decoupled dynamics of the SEA system is first established to fit the various scenarios by considering the large parametric uncertainties, nonlinearities, and unmodeled uncertainties. The adaptive robust control algorithm with an effective compensation mechanism is then developed to attenuate the uncertainties. Theoretically, the proposed approach guarantees the stability and high performance of the SEA system. Comparative experiments are carried out on a SEA testbed, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach has significant performance improvements over previous approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]