BACKGROUND: Accuracy of needle tip placement and needle tracking in soft tissue are of particular importance in many medical procedures. In recent years, developing autonomous and teleoperated systems for needle insertion has become an active area of research. METHODS: In this study, needle insertion was performed using a master-slave set-up with multi-degrees of freedom. The effect of force feedback on the accuracy of needle insertion was investigated. In addition, this study compared autonomous, teleoperated and semi-autonomous needle insertion. RESULTS: The results of this study show that incorporation of force feedback can improve teleoperated needle insertion. However, autonomous and semi-autonomous needle insertions, which use feedback from a deflection model, provide significantly better performance. CONCLUSIONS: Development of a haptic master-slave needle insertion system, which is capable of performing some autonomous tasks based on feedback from tissue deformation and needle deflection models, can improve the performance of autonomous robotics-based insertions as well as non-autonomous teleoperated manual insertions.