Victor Scheinman

Victor Scheinman was an American mechanical engineer who designed influential early robotic manipulators. As a graduate student at Stanford University he built the Stanford Arm in 1969, one of the first robot arms designed from the outset for computer control rather than adapted from other machinery, and he later designed the Programmable Universal Manipulator for Assembly (PUMA) for Unimation, a compact electric robotic arm that became a standard research and industrial platform through the 1980s. His designs helped establish the mechanical and control conventions still used in robotic arm engineering today.