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 Leonard 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 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. As a child and teenager Scheinman designed and constructed a voice-controlled typewriter; this Science Fair project both gave him entry into MIT as an undergraduate in engineering as well as providing a foundation for his later inventions. He was a graduate of the now-defunct New Lincoln High School in New York. In the late 1950s, and while in high school, Scheinman engineered a speech-to-text machine as a science fair project. Scheinman attended MIT as an undergraduate, starting at age 16 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, Holt Ashley, he got a job 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 complete his Masters degree in one year and stayed on to work on an engineer's degree. He had summer jobs working on the Apollo program, with project 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 arm for computers. 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.