Graduating in 1903, he saw service in the Asiatic Station before making a cruise from Honolulu, Hawaii to Panama aboard the Paul Jones, the first long voyage undertaken by a destroyer.

[1][2] During the round-the-world cruise, he met his future wife on a port call in San Francisco, California, and they were married on March 9, 1909, two weeks after Vermont returned with the fleet to Hampton Roads, Virginia.

[3] Later that year, the Navy established a formal graduate program at the Academy, and Robinson was one of 10 students selected for the first class of the School of Marine Engineering, alongside future four-star admiral James O.

[4] Robinson was credited with pioneering electric drive propulsion in the U.S. Navy,[5] beginning with his tour as executive officer and chief engineer of the newly built collier Jupiter.

Jupiter was the first major ship equipped with turboelectric drive by the U.S. Navy, as part of a controlled experiment to evaluate the relative merits of competing propulsion mechanisms.

[2] Three new colliers of the same class were each equipped with a different propulsion type: Cyclops with reciprocating engines, Neptune with geared turbines, and Jupiter with a turboelectric drive supplied by the General Electric Company.

While underway off the coaling station in Tiburon, California in preparation for its shakedown cruise, Jupiter took evasive action to avoid an accidental collision with a passing submarine.

[7] Robinson remained with Jupiter for its shakedown cruise, during which the collier traveled from the West Coast to the Atlantic and became the first naval vessel to transit the Panama Canal.

[2] At the end of Jupiter's trials, Robinson reported that turboelectric drive was lighter and more compact than the competing propulsion methods, and moreover was easily operated by relatively unskilled sailors, permitted accurate speed control, and exceeded General Electric's economy estimates by a remarkable 18 percent.

[1] The merger was the brainchild of Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison, who wanted centralized control of shipbuilding but had failed in a previous effort to create a chief of shore operations, which the sea-going admirals had resisted as placing excessive responsibility and power in the hands of a mere technical officer.

He mustered legislative support by testifying some 50 times before Congressional committees to explain the Navy's materiel requirements, and mobilized industry resources by exhaustively surveying and reserving the nation's shipbuilding facilities.

Thanks in large part to Robinson's careful preparation, when Congress appropriated the funds to expand the fleet by 70% in September 1940, the Navy awarded almost every contract within an hour after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the bill.

Robinson and his Army counterpart, Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, reported directly to the chairman of the War Production Board, Donald M. Nelson, who delegated them responsibility for all military procurement in the United States.