Victor Scheinman - Biography

Victor Scheinman is a pioneer in the field of robotics. He is a graduate of the now-defunct New Lincoln High School in New York. In the late 1950s, and while in high school, Scheinman engineered a speech-to-text machine as a science fair project. In 1972 (some sources say 1969), while at Stanford University, Scheinman invented the Stanford arm, an all-electric, 6-axis articulated robot designed to permit an arm solution in closed form. 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. In 1973, Scheinman started Vicarm Inc. to manufacture his robot arms. In 1977, Scheinman sold his design to Unimation, who further developed it, with support from General Motors, as the Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly (PUMA). He served briefly as General Manager of Unimation's West Coast division before joining Automatix as a cofounder and vice-president in 1980. While at Automatix, Scheinman developed RobotWorld, a system of cooperating small modules suspended from a 2-D linear motor. The product line was later sold to Yaskawa.

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".).

Today Scheinman continues to consult and is a visiting professor at Stanford University in the department of mechanical engineering.

His niece is jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman. He was married to Sandra Auerback in August 2006 [1].

External links

• Stanford Arm history
• Vicarm
• Yaskawa RobotWorld page
• Jeopardy! #5029