A variable admittance adaptive active fault-tolerant control method based on position control as self disturbance rejection was proposed for industrial robot systems affected by external disturbances, actuator failures, and environmental disturbances. First, an auto-disturbance rejection controller was designed to achieve position tracking while eliminating the impact of external disturbances on the actuator. Second, in order to obtain accurate internal fault information of joints in actual operations except for external disturbances, an adaptive active fault-tolerant mechanism was introduced on the basis of position control to detect and compensate for faults that occur during the robot’s control process. Finally, a variable admittance controller was used to optimize the end flexibility performance of the robot by adjusting admittance parameters online to improve the stability of the robot system. After simulation verification, the proposed method can effectively improve the fault tolerance and flexibility of industrial robots, and has good robustness and reliability in the  robot control process, providing new ideas and methods for the intelligence and automation of industrial robots.