Victor David Scheinman was born on December 28, 1942, in Augusta, Georgia, and died on September 20, 2016.
He was an American inventor.
Scheinman was a pioneer in the field of robotics.
Scheinman was a graduate of the now-defunct New Lincoln High School in New York.
During the late 1950s, and while in high school, Scheinman engineered a speech-to-text machine as a science fair project.
During 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.
Which 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.
During 1973, Scheinman started Vicarm Inc. to manufacture his robot arms.
During 1977, Scheinman sold his design to Unimation, who further developed it, with support from General Motors, as the Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly (PUMA).
Victor Scheinman served briefly as General Manager of Unimation’s West Coast division before joining Automatix as a cofounder and vice-president in 1980.
Up until his death, Scheinman continued to consult and was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the department of mechanical engineering.
He died in Petrolia, California.
Victor Scheinman passed away at 73 years old.