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.

Scheinman's first experience with robots was watching The Day the Earth Stood Still around age 8 or 9.

The movie frightened him and his father suggested building a wooden model as therapy.

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.

This endeavor gave him entry into MIT as an undergraduate in engineering, as well as providing a foundation for his later inventions.

The lab had an electric prosthetic arm developed circa 1962 by Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, known as the Rancho arm, which they had interfaced to a computer.

(The arm was originally designed to be controlled with buttons pressed by a user's tongue.) Scheinman was assigned to maintaining the arm but it proved hard to use, with poor accuracy and inverse kinematics that were difficult to compute.

He became involved with new robot designs.

One was the Orm arm, (Norwegian for snake) which he built with Larry Leifer.

It consisted of seven stacked plates, with each plate connected to the next by four small pneumatic actuators.

Each actuator of which could be inflated or deflated by setting or resetting a bit in a computer word.

That arm also proved difficult to control.

His next goal was a fast arm, which became the Stanford Hydraulic Arm.

The hydraulic arm needed the full attention of the PDP-6 computer used to control it, which normally was time-shared, and the arm proved too powerful, with its motions shaking the computer room and requiring special isolation.

Scheinman attended MIT as an undergraduate, starting at age 15, and completed a degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1963.

He was president of the Model Airplane Club and had a summer job at Sikorsky Aircraft.

His Bachelor's thesis was on controlling the depth of a model hydrofoil wing in the MIT towing tank.

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.

Scheinman was awarded a research assistantship at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working for Bernard Roth on building hands and arms for computers.

Donald L. Pieper, in his 1968 PhD thesis lists its purpose as "smashing things."

Pieper's thesis also recommended specific configurations of robot linkages that would allow easier arm solutions.

In 1969, Scheinman invented the Stanford arm, an all-electric, 6-axis articulated robot designed to permit an arm solution in closed form.

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.

After completing his engineer's degree, Scheinman went to work for RacChem, designing automatic machines that would use RacChem's shrink plastic products.

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.

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.