This paper presents the first adaptive control result for flexible joint robot manipulators. Under the assumption of weak joint elasticity a singular perturbation argument is used to show that recent adaptive control results for rigid robots may be used to control flexible joint robots provided a simple correction term is added to the control law to damp out the elastic oscillations at the joints. In this way fundamental properties of rigid robot dynamics, such as passivity, may be exploited to design robust adaptive control laws for flexible joint robots.