309:, which started operations in January 1980, was based in Massachusetts, but Scheinman ran its west coast office, where he developed RobotWorld, an automation system based on the concept that robots should operate in their own workspace, where there would be no potential conflicts with humans. It consisted of cooperating small modules suspended from a 2-D linear motor that formed the roof of the workspace. The West Coast office also supported other Automatix product development by designing components such as robot wrists. In the early 1990s, Automatix decided to stop selling robots because the application engineering required for each robot installation could exceed the cost of the robot itself by a factor of three or four and wasn't profitable. The RobotWorld product line was sold to
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226:, 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
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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 cord 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. Scheinman was then approached by
237:. Vicarm got orders for copies of the Stanford arm and MIT arm from various research organizations, including universities, General Motors, the National Bureau of Standards, AT&T, and the Naval Research Laboratory. The company soon offered a controller for the robots, using a Digital Equipment Corporation
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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,
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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,
165:) 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.
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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.
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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.
273:. These early robots were hydraulic and programmed by teaching the robot a series of individual points that the robot would repeat each cycle. Some path control could be achieved by defining many intermediated points, but true path following was not possible.
281:(GM) who wanted a bigger version of his arm for a robotic assembly concept they were developing, but were concerned about his small company's ability to supply them, encouraging Scheinman to find a larger partner. In 1977, Scheinman sold his design to
157:, 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
390:, 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".).
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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
129:'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
313:, which offered them for biological lab automation and small part assembly. Scheinman worked for Yaskawa as a consultant for several years, and seven to eight hundred RobotWorld-based systems were sold.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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Scheinman setting up his RobotWorld system in the
Automatix booth at the Robots '86 show in Detroit in June 1986. The underside of the top is a two-dimensional
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grid. Small manipulators and camera sensor modules can move freely on the grid to perform assembly operations and other manipulations in the space underneath.
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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
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microprocessors controlling the servos for each joint, including the end effector. They also developed a language, VAL, for controlling the robot.
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and several of its customers, observing robot applications, including loading and unloading machines, handling material, and early attempts to do
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around age 8 or 9. The movie frightened him and his father suggested building a wooden model as therapy. Scheinman attended the now-defunct
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In 1973, Scheinman started Vicarm Inc. to manufacture his robot arms, hiring Brian
Carlisle and Bruce Shimano, who later helped found
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His next goal was a fast arm, which became the
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that were difficult to compute. He became involved with new robot designs. One was the Orm arm, (Norwegian for
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at the age of 73. Up to the time of his death, Scheinman continued to consult and was a visiting professor at
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The
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and his father returned to work as a professor of psychiatry. His mother taught at a Hebrew school.
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as an undergraduate in engineering, as well as providing a foundation for his later inventions.
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Scheinman's MIT Arm, built for MIT's
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RobotWorld linear motor. Manipulators or sensors were mounted on the opposite face.
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D. L. Pieper, The kinematics of manipulators under computer control
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576:"Victor Scheinman, Assembly Line Robot Inventor, Dies at 73"
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Gene Bylinsky, Fortune Magazine, December 17, 1979, p.90 ff
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On June 22, 2006, broadcast of the American game show
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Scheinman was awarded a research assistantship at the
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Scheinman's first experience with robots was watching
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In 1979, Scheinman and his Vicarm were featured in a
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459:Victor Scheinman: My Man in the Smithsonian
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