Victor Scheinman

Victor Scheinman (December 28, 1942 to September 20, 2016) was an American roboticist born in Augusta, Georgia, credited with designing the first electric robot arm built specifically for computer control. He entered MIT at age fifteen and completed a degree in aeronautics and astronautics there in 1963, then earned a master's degree at Stanford University, switching from aeronautics and astronautics to mechanical engineering, followed by an engineer's degree at Stanford. Working as a research assistant under Bernard Roth at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he designed the Stanford arm in 1969, and around 1972 designed the MIT Arm for Marvin Minsky. He founded Vicarm Inc. in 1973 to manufacture robot arms, sold the design to Unimation in 1977, where it became the basis for the PUMA robot, and worked for a couple of years afterward as general manager of Unimation's West Coast division. In January 1980 he co-founded Automatix as vice president, running its west coast office and developing the RobotWorld automation system, later consulted for Yaskawa, and served as a visiting professor in Stanford's Department of Mechanical Engineering until his death in Petrolia, California, in 2016.