One of the most important features of the fMRI is that it uses non-ionizing radiation and is thus safer than more invasive competing technologies, like PET, without the loss of localization of activity seen in passive technologies like EEG or MEG. The drawback to fMRI that we overcome with the haptic robot adaptation is to make equipment compatible with the high magnetic field and noise sensitivity of the fMRI while maintaining its functionality. Previous attempts to study human motor behavior have relied on either compressed air 8 or water 9 devices that have poor response times making them inappropriate for realistic interaction with the environment or drives located external to the scanner room with limited degrees of freedom. The solution here, similar to a previous study that used an unshielded lower-force model robot, in a 1.5 T fMRI 4, keeping the equipment in the room and shielding, gives the full range of motion of air compressors, but with the fast, millisecond latencies of electric drives.