Victor Scheinman
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.[1]
Scheinman's first experience with robots was watching
Education
Scheinman attended
After graduation, on the advice and recommendation of his advisor, he got a job at Boeing, where he worked on a lunar gravity simulator. 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 completed his Master's degree in one year and stayed on to work on an engineer's degree. 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
Robotics
Scheinman was awarded a research assistantship at the
His next goal was a fast arm, which became the Stanford Hydraulic Arm. The hydraulic arm needed the full attention of the
Stanford arm
In 1969, Scheinman invented the Stanford arm,[2]: 4.5 an all-electric, 6-axis articulated robot designed to permit an arm solution in closed form.[6][7] The three wrist axes intersect at a point, as prescribed by Pipers 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.[2]: 4.4
After completing his engineer's degree, Scheinman went to work for RacChem, designing automatic machines that would use RacChem's shrink plastic products.[2]: 4.5 After about a year, Stanford asked him to come back as an employee of the AI lab and build the robot he had designed. He completed the first arm, the Gold arm, and was asked to build a second, the Blue arm, to allow experiments in arm coordination with vision. 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.[2]: 4.5
MIT arm
Around 1972, Scheinman was asked by MIT's Marvin Minsky to design a more compact arm. Minsky had funding from DARPA for a new robot and had visions of using it for remotely supervised surgery. Scheinman spent the summer at the MIT AI lab, designing a new arm that became the MIT Arm, completing the design back at Stanford. Like the Stanford arm, the new arm featured a wrist with all axes intersecting, allowing a closed-form arm solution, but now all the axes were revolute, unlike the Stanford arm which had a prismatic joint. The arm had a shell structure made of sheet metal, instead of beams, that contained all the wiring. 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
PUMA and Unimation
While studying at Stanford, Scheinman was awarded a fellowship sponsored by
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 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.[2]: 4.7 Scheinman was then approached by
Automatix
In 1979, Scheinman was approached by
Personal life
His niece is a jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman. He was married to Sandra Auerback in August 2006.[10] His engineer son Dave Scheinman is head of hardware for 3D printing company Carbon (company)[11]
Victor Scheinman died on September 20, 2016, in Petrolia, California at the age of 73.[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.
Awards and honors
In 1979, Scheinman and his Vicarm were featured in a
Scheinman received the
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
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".).[17]
References
- ^ Wedding: Sandra Auerback and Victor Scheinman
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Victor Scheinman, an oral history, conducted in 2010 by Peter Asaro and Selma Šabanović, Indiana University, Bloomington Indiana, for Indiana University and the IEEE.
- ^ Victor Scheinman: My Man in the Smithsonian
- ^ Rancho Arm image, Computer History Museum
- ^ D. L. Pieper, The kinematics of manipulators under computer control. PhD thesis, Stanford University, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 1968.
- ^ Stanford Arm history
- ^ "History of the Assembly Line, DBusiness, Detroit, MI, Henry Ford". www.dbusiness.com. Archived from the original on 2013-05-12.
- ^ Yaskawa RobotWorld page
- ^ Clinical Lab Robots for Specimen Processing, Yaskawa, accessed March 19, 2020
- ^ www.nytimes.com
- ^ "Who We Are".
- ^ "Victor Scheinman, Assembly Line Robot Inventor, Dies at 73". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 September 2016.
- ^ Those Smart Young Robots on the Production Line, Gene Bylinsky, Fortune Magazine, December 17, 1979, p.90 ff
- ^ "A3 Robotics".
- ^ "Leonardo da Vinci Award".
- ^ Robotics Online
- ^ Jeopardy! #5029