thumb|Victor Scheinman at the [[MIT Museum with a PUMA robot in 2014]]

thumb|The Stanford arm, designed in 1969 by Scheinman and later built by him, was the first electric robot arm [[321 kinematic structure|designed for computer control.]]

thumb|Scheinman's MIT Arm, built for MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab , forerunner of the [[Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly|PUMA]]

thumb|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.]]

upright|thumb|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.

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.

Etude

Scheinman attended MIT as an undergraduate, starting at age 15, 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. 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.

Stanford arm

In 1969, Scheinman invented the Stanford arm, The three wrist axes intersect at a point, as prescribed by Pieper's 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 a time-shared computer. The design became his engineer's degree thesis.

PUMA and Unimation

While studying at Stanford, Scheinman was awarded a fellowship sponsored by George Devol, the inventor of the Unimate, the first industrial robot. Scheinman traveled with Devol and Joe Engelberger to Unimation 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 achieved 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 cord 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. 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. His engineer son Dave Scheinman is head of hardware for 3D printing company Carbon (company)

Victor Scheinman died on September 20, 2016, in Petrolia, California 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's Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Award in 1986 and the ASME Leonardo Da Vinci Award 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!, 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".).

References

  • Vicarm