Physically connected humans have been shown to exploit the exchange of haptic forces
and tactile information to improve their performance in joint action tasks. As human interac tions are increasingly mediated through robots and networks it is important to understand
the impact that network features such as lag and noise may have on human behaviour. In
this paper, we investigated interaction with a human-like robot controller that provides simi lar haptic communication behaviour as human-human interaction and examined the influ ence and compensation mechanisms for delay and noise on haptic communication. The
results of our experiments show that participants can perceive a difference between noise
and delay, and make use of compensation mechanisms to preserve performance in both
cases. However, while noise is compensated for by increasing co-contraction, delay com pensation could not be explained by this strategy. Instead, computational modelling sug gested that a distinct mechanism is used to compensate for the delay and yield an efficient
haptic communication.