"Haptics" is the human perception of forces, torques and motion. The characteristic feature of this modality is the nonseparability of sender and receiver "device".
This is of particular interest if two humans are connected in some way. In this, case, every action of one partner results in an immediate reaction of the other one. By this means, information is exchanged. This "haptic communication" takes place consciously as well as unconsciously. But, there has been no detaild research on this field up to now.

In the future robots will gradually become part of our daily life. However, this can only be realized if humans and machines have the possibility to interact naturally, i.e. in a human-like way. The robot has to be able to recognize human intention and derive appropriate actions.

Therefore, it is necessary to understand haptic interaction between two humans and to derive a model of it. Afterwards, this model of interaction can be implemented in a robot to increase its autonomy.
A field of application is telepresence. An interaction model can be used to compensate delay times and bridge disturbances. As a typical scenario the cooperative manipulation of an object is under consideration. The tasks to be solved can vary highly and require the use of suitable control strategies.