Victor Scheinman

Victor Scheinman at the MIT Museum with a PUMA robot in 2014
The Stanford arm, designed in 1969 by Scheinman and later built by him, was the first electric robot arm designed for computer control.
Scheinman's MIT Arm, built for MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab ca. 1972, forerunner of the PUMA
Scheinman setting up his RobotWorld system in the Automatix booth at the Robots '86 show in Detroit in June 1986. The underside of the top is a two-dimensional linear motor grid. Small manipulators and camera sensor modules can move freely on the grid to perform assembly operations and other manipulations in the space underneath.
RobotWorld linear motor. Manipulators or sensors were mounted on the opposite face.

Victor David Scheinman (December 28, 1942 – September 20, 2016) was an American pioneer in the field of robotics. He was born in Augusta, Georgia, where his father Léonard was stationed with the US Army. At the end of the war, the family moved to Brooklyn and his father returned to work as a professor of psychiatry. His mother taught at a Hebrew school.[1]

Scheinman's first experience with robots was watching The Day the Earth Stood Still around age 8 or 9. The movie frightened him and his father suggested building a wooden model as therapy.[2]: 4.1  Scheinman attended the now-defunct New Lincoln School 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 as an undergraduate in engineering, as well as providing a foundation for his later inventions.[3]

  1. ^ Wedding: Sandra Auerback and Victor Scheinman
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference vdsoralhistory was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Victor Scheinman: My Man in the Smithsonian