Victor David Scheinman (December 28, 1942 – September 20, 2016) was an American pioneer in the field of

robot A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may ...

ics. He was born in

Augusta, Georgia Augusta ( ), officially Augusta–Richmond County, is a consolidated city-county on the central eastern border of the U.S. state of Georgia. The city lies across the Savannah River from South Carolina at the head of its navigable portion. Georgi ...

, where his father Leonard was stationed with the US Army. At the end of the war the family moved to

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

and his father returned to work as a professor of psychiatry. His mother taught at a Hebrew school. Scheinman first experience with robots was watching ''

The Day the Earth Stood Still ''The Day the Earth Stood Still'' (a.k.a. ''Farewell to the Master'' and ''Journey to the World'') is a 1951 American science fiction film from 20th Century Fox, produced by Julian Blaustein and directed by Robert Wise. It stars Michael Re ...

'' around age 8 or 9. The movie frightened him and his father suggested building a wooden model as therapy. Scheinman sttended the now-defunct

New Lincoln School The New Lincoln School was a private experimental coeducational school in New York City enrolling students from kindergarten through grade 12. History New Lincoln's predecessor was founded as Lincoln School in 1917 by the Rockefeller-funded Gener ...

in New York where, in the late 1950s, he designed and constructed a voice-controlled typewriter as a science fair project. This endeavor gave him entry into

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

as an undergraduate in engineering, as well as providing a foundation for his later inventions.

Education

Scheinman attended

as an undergraduate, starting at age 16 and completed a degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1963. He was president of the Model Airplane Club and had a summer job at Sikorsky Aircraft. His Bachelor's thesis was on controlling the depth of a model hydrofoil wing in the MIT towing tank. After graduation, on the advice and recommendation of his advisor,

Holt Ashley Holt Ashley (January 10, 1923May 9, 2006) was an American aeronautical engineer notable for his seminal research of aeroelasticity.Stanford University's graduate program, initially in Aeronautics and Astronautics, switching later to Mechanical Engineering, while still taking courses in A&E. He complete his Master's degree in one year and stayed on to work on an engineer's degree. He had summer jobs working on the Apollo program, with project on the Command Module heat shield and the Saturn rocket turbopumps.

Robotics

Scheinman was awarded a research assistantship at the

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center ...

, working for Bernard Roth on building hands and arm for computers. The lab had an electric prosthetic arm developed circa 1962 by Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, known as the Rancho arm, which they had interfaced to a computer. (The arm was originally designed to be controlled with buttons pressed by a user's tongue.) Scheinman was assigned to maintaining the arm but it proved hard to use, with poor accuracy and inverse kinematics that were difficult to compute. He became involved with new robot designs. One was the Orm arm, (Norwegian for ''snake'') which he built with Larry Leifer. It consisted of seven stacked plates, with each plate connected to the next by four small pneumatic actuators. Each actuator of which could be inflated or deflated by setting or resetting a bit in a computer word. That arm also proved difficult to control. His next goal was a fast arm, which became the Stanford Hydraulic Arm. The hydraulic arm needed the full attention of the

PDP-6 The PDP-6, short for Programmed Data Processor model 6, is a computer developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) during 1963 and first delivered in the summer of 1964. It was an expansion of DEC's existing 18-bit systems to use a 36-bit d ...

computer used to control it, which normally was time-shared, and the arm proved too powerful, with its motions shaking the computer room and requiring special isolation. Donald L. Pieper, in his 1968 PhD thesis lists its purpose as "smashing things." Pieper thesis also recommended specific configurations of robot linkages that would allow easier

arm solution In the engineering field of robotics, an arm solution is a set of calculations that allow the real-time computation of the control commands needed to place the end of a robotic arm at a desired position and orientation in space. A typical indust ...

s.D. L. Pieper, The kinematics of manipulators under computer control
PhD thesis, Stanford University, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 1968.

Stanford arm

In 1969, Scheinman invented the

Stanford arm Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

, an all-electric, 6-axis articulated robot designed to permit an

in closed form. The three wrist axes intersect at a point, as prescribed by Pipers thesis. This allowed the robot to accurately follow arbitrary paths in space under computer control and widened the potential use of the robot to more sophisticated applications such as assembly and arc welding. The robot also had brakes on each axis, allowing it to be controlled with time-shared computer. The design became his engineer's degree thesis. After completing his engineer's degree, Scheinman went to work for RacChem, designing automatic machines that would use RacChem's shrink plastic products. After about a year, Stanford asked him to come back as an employee of the AI lab and build the robot he had designed. He completed the first arm, the Gold arm, and was asked to build a second, the Blue arm, to allow experiments in arm coordination with vision. Other organizations wanted the arm, including SRI and Boston University, so Scheinman built kits for them that could be completed by a commercial machine shop.

MIT arm

Around 1972, Scheinman was asked by MIT's

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...

to design a more compact arm. Minsky had funding from DARPA for a new robot and had visions of using it for remotely supervised surgery. Scheinman spent the summer at the MIT AI lab, designing a new arm that became the MIT Arm, completing the design back at Stanford. Like the Stanford arm, the new arm featured a wrist with all axes intersecting, allowing a closed form arm solution, but now all the axes were revolute, unlike the Stanford arm which had a prismatic joint. The arm had a shell structure made of sheet metal, instead of beams, that contained all the wiring. It also used specially designed gear trains, in part to minimize

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, and custom electric motors, rather than only off the shelf components. In 1973, Scheinman started Vicarm Inc. to manufacture his robot arms, hiring Brian Carlisle and Bruce Shimano, who later helped found Adept Robotics. Vicarm got orders for copies of the Stanford arm and MIT arm from various research organizations, including universities, General Motors, the National Bureau of Standards, AT&T, and the Naval Research Laboratory. The company soon offered a controller for the robots, using a Digital Equipment Corporation

LSI-11 The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, ...

, with

6502 The MOS Technology 6502 (typically pronounced "sixty-five-oh-two" or "six-five-oh-two") William Mensch and the moderator both pronounce the 6502 microprocessor as ''"sixty-five-oh-two"''. is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small te ...

microprocessors controlling the servos for each joint, including the end effector. They also developed a language, VAL, for controlling the robot.Victor Scheinman, an oral history
conducted in 2010 by Peter Asaro and Selma Šabanović, Indiana University, Bloomington Indiana, for Indiana University and the IEEE.

PUMA and Unimation

While studying at Stanford, Scheinman was awarded a fellowship sponsored by

George Devol George Charles Devol Jr. (February 20, 1912 – August 11, 2011) was an American inventor, best known for creating Unimate, the first industrial robot. Devol's invention earned him the title "Grandfather of Robotics". The National Inventor ...

, the inventor of the

Unimate Unimate was the first industrial robot, which worked on a General Motors assembly line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961.Mickle, Paul"1961: A peep into the automated future" ''The Trentonian''. Accessed Aug ...

, the first industrial robot. Scheinman traveled with Devol and Joe Engelberger to

Unimation Unimation was the world's first robotics company. It was founded in 1962 by Joseph F. Engelberger and George Devol and was located in Danbury, Connecticut. Devol had already applied for a patent an industrial robotic arm in 1954; was issued in ...

and several of its customers, observing robot applications, including loading and unloading machines, handling material and early attempts to do spot welding. These early robots were hydraulic and programmed by teaching the robot a series of individual points that the robot would repeat each cycle. Some path control could be achieve by defining many intermediated points, but true path following was not possible. The Vicarm and its controller were small enough to be portable and Scheinman brought one to Unimation and set it up on Engelberger's desk, demonstrating the true path control that Unimation's robots could not achieve. He also brought an arm to an early robot trade show at the University of Illinois but was told it was a toy and could not be in the show, so he set it up on the front steps with an extension for power, attracting many researchers who understood its programmability advantage. Engelberger then invited him to bring the robot into his Unimation booth at the show. Scheinman was then approached by General Motors (GM) who wanted a bigger version of his arm for a robotic assembly concept they were developing, but were concerned about his small company's ability to supply them, encouraging Scheinman to find a larger partner. In 1977, Scheinman sold his design to

, who further developed it, with support from GM, as the

Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly The PUMA (''Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly'', or ''Programmable Universal Manipulation Arm'') is an industrial robotic arm developed by Victor Scheinman at pioneering robot company Unimation. Initially developed for General Motors, ...

(PUMA). He served for a couple of years as General Manager of Unimation's West Coast division.

Automatix

In 1979, Scheinman was approached by

Philippe Villers Philippe Villers founded the company Computervision with Marty Allen in 1969. In 1980 he co-founded Automatix, an early robotics company, which he led until 1986. He later served as president of Cognition Corporation for 3 years. He is curren ...

, then at

Computervision Computervision, Inc. (CV) was an early pioneer in Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/ CAM). Computervision was founded in 1969 by Marty Allen and Philippe Villers, and headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. Its early ...

, to join a new robotics and machine vision company he was forming as co-founder and vice-president. Automatix, which started operations in January 1980, was based in Massachusetts, but Scheinman ran its west coast office, where he developed RobotWorld, an automation system based on the concept that robots should operate in their own work space, where there would be no potential conflicts with humans. It consisted of cooperating small modules suspended from a 2-D linear motor that formed the roof of the workspace. The west coast office also supported other Automatix product development by designing components such as robot wrists. In the early 1990s, Automatix decided to stop selling robots because the application engineering required for each robot installation could exceed the cost of the robot itself by a factor of three or four and wasn't profitable. The RobotWorld product line was sold to

Yaskawa The is a Japanese manufacturer of servos, motion controllers, AC motor drives, switches and industrial robots. Their Motoman robots are heavy duty industrial robots used in welding, packaging, assembly, coating, cutting, material handling a ...

, which offered them for biological lab automation and small part assembly. Scheinman worked for Yaskawa as a consultant for several years, and seven to eight hundred RobotWorld-based systems were sold.

Personal life

His niece is jazz violinist

Jenny Scheinman Jenny Scheinman is a jazz violinist. She has produced several critically acclaimed solo albums, including ''12 Songs'', named one of the Top Ten Albums of 2005 by ''The New York Times''. She has played with Linda Perry, Norah Jones, Nels Cline ...

. He was married to Sandra Auerback in August 2006. His engineer son Dave Scheinman is head of hardware for

3D printing 3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer co ...

company Carbon (company) Victor Scheinman died on September 20, 2016, in

Petrolia, California Petrolia is an unincorporated community in Humboldt County, California, northeast of Cape Mendocino, at an elevation of above sea level, within ZIP Code 95558, and area code 707. Petrolia was the site of the first oil well drilled in Califor ...

at the age of 73. Up to the time of his death, Scheinman continued to consult and was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Awards and honors

In 1979, Scheinman and his Vicarm were featured in a '' Fortune Magazine'' cover story on robotics. Scheinman received the

Robotic Industries Association The Robotic Industries Association (RIA) was a United States trade group that serves the robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of rob ...

Joseph F. Engelberger Joseph Frederick Engelberger (July 26, 1925 – December 1, 2015) was an American physicist, engineer and entrepreneur. Licensing the original patent awarded to inventor George Devol, Engelberger developed the first industrial robot in the Uni ...

Robotics Award in 1986 and the

ASME Leonardo Da Vinci Award The American Society of Mechanical Engineers Design and Engineering Division awards yearly the Leonardo Da Vinci Award to eminent engineers whose design or invention is recognized as an important advance in machine design. The award is named after ...

of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1990. On April 19, 2002, General Motors' Controls, Robotics, and Welding (CRW) organization donated the original prototype Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly (PUMA) robot to the Smithsonian. On June 22, 2006, broadcast of the American game-show

Jeopardy! ''Jeopardy!'' is an American game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given gene ...

, Scheinman was the subject of the $1600 "answer" for the category "Robotics": "In the 1970s Victor Scheinman developed the PUMA, or programmable universal manipulation THIS" (question: "what is THIS?" — answer: "arm".).Jeopardy! #5029
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References

External links

Vicarm
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scheinman, Victor 1942 births 2016 deaths Jewish American scientists Scientists from New York City American roboticists Stanford University faculty Industrial robotics People from Humboldt County, California 21st-century American Jews