Research in the areas of haptics and virtual reality has recently seen great progress, and made significant contributions to the related science, technology, and application domains. In parallel, significant progress has been made on research and development yielding a variety of component technologies for robotics that enable more complex and capable robotic systems. The 2016 IEEE SMC special session will report research results in the field of robotic systems and the fields of human machine interfaces and haptics, including as applied to robotic and intelligent sensing. This special session will provide the opportunity for researchers from both academia and industry to present their latest work, share ideas and establish contacts with other researchers in their field.