Alum Named to ASME’s 2026 Watch List for Robotics Work at Tesla
Tesla manufacturing engineer and Northeastern University alum Joshua Joseph, MS’23, mechanical engineering, has been named to ASME’s 2026 Watch List for his work pioneering autonomous mobile robot deployment and human-robot collaboration frameworks in factory settings. Beyond his day job, he sits on the ANSI/RIA Industrial Robot Safety Standards Committee, is building a readiness assessment tool for small manufacturers adopting robots, and mentors early-career engineers through a LinkedIn community.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Rich McKay.
Robotics helped kick-start this grad’s career at Telsa
Joshua Joseph overcame setbacks to succeed in the world of autonomous machines. Now he’s mentoring fellow huskies.
Joshua Joseph failed. Again and again.
Just out of college in Chennai, India, he dreamed of becoming a civil servant as a way to have an impact on society. So he decided to pursue a prestigious job to run a municipality or a province, because he loved organizing people and systems and rules.
What Joseph faced, however, was three years of rejections, vying for one of around 1,000 open jobs across the country as he squared off against about 1 million other applicants competing in national tests each year, he said.
“I was out-of-work, it was very discouraging,” Joseph, 29, now of Austin, Texas, recalled. “There was fatigue. That was three years out of my career. But I learned, even if you fail, don’t let the frustration stop you. It teaches you to try something else.”
That decision led him to Northeastern University in Boston and ultimately to a job as a Tesla robotics engineer who now develops fleets of autonomous robots for use in Tesla’s four major factories across North America.
Yingzi Lin, a professor and the chair of the College of Engineering, said that Joseph is “becoming quite famous,” as an up and coming voice in the autonomous machine industry.
He speaks at conferences, serves on national robotics boards, writes articles on the future of robotics for trade publications, and he was recently named to the 2026 “Watch List” by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The ASME list features 25 early-career engineers who help advance new technologies.
Joseph said he wasn’t at liberty to publicly discuss intricate details of what he does at Tesla, but he works at the company’s Austin-based “Gigafactory, Texas,” near Austin, which is the manufacturing hub where Tesla’s Cybertruck and Model Y vehicles – a midsize electric SUV – are built.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News