In this paper a safe arm with passive compliant joints and visco-elastic covering is designed for human-friendly service robots. The passive compliant joint (PCJ) is composed of a magneto-rheological (MR) damper and a rotary spring. In addition to a spring component, a damper is introduced for damping effect and works as a rotary viscous damper by controlling the electric current according to the angular velocity of spring displacement. When a manipulator interacts with human or environment, the joints and cover passively operate and attenuate the applied collision force. The force attenuation property is verified through collision experiments showing that the proposed passive arm is safe in view of some evaluation measures.