Victor Scheinman
[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.
He left to travel the world for a while, and then enrolled at Stanford University's graduate program, initially in Aeronautics and Astronautics, switching later to Mechanical Engineering, while still taking courses in A&E.
He had summer jobs working on the Apollo program, with projects on the Command Module heat shield and the Saturn rocket turbopumps.
[2]: 4.3 Scheinman was awarded a research assistantship at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working for Bernard Roth on building hands and arms for computers.
Scheinman was assigned to maintaining the arm but it proved hard to use, with poor accuracy and inverse kinematics that were difficult to compute.
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.
It also used specially designed gear trains, in part to minimize backlash, and custom electric motors, rather than only off-the-shelf components.
[2]: 4.5 In 1973, Scheinman started Vicarm Inc. to manufacture his robot arms, hiring Brian Carlisle and Bruce Shimano, who later helped found Adept Technology.
[2]: 4.6 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.
[2]: 4.7 In 1977, Scheinman sold his design to Unimation, who further developed it, with support from GM, as the Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly (PUMA).
In 1979, Scheinman was approached by Philippe Villers, then at Computervision, to join a new robotics and machine vision company he was forming as co-founder and vice-president.
The RobotWorld product line was sold to Yaskawa,[8] which offered them for biological lab automation and small part assembly.
[12] 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.
