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About

Joshua Wade is a leading researcher in robotic tactile perception, with a focus on enabling robots to understand their physical environment through touch. His work centers on multimodal tactile sensing, combining thermal, force, and data-driven methods to allow robots to recognize materials, objects, and even people in real-world settings. Wade’s major contributions include pioneering the use of heat transfer for material recognition, demonstrating that a robot can identify an object’s material by analyzing conductive heat flow from a tactile sensor during short-duration contact—work that has garnered 50 citations. He further advanced the field by developing a force and thermal sensing skin for robots in human environments (34 citations) and by addressing the challenge of multimodal tactile perception in cluttered, real homes (33 citations). Notably, Wade provided evidence that data-driven thermal sensing can reliably distinguish between contact with people and objects (13 citations), and he created a handheld device for in situ acquisition of multimodal tactile training data. His research bridges the gap between laboratory experiments and practical robotic applications, making him a key figure in the push toward more perceptive and adaptable robots for everyday environments.