I worked at Unimation when Vic Scheinman came to demonstrate his robot to myself, Maury Dunne, and Bill Perzley.
Vic set up the robot and the computer. The robot started, typed some words, and typed a command to stop itself. I took an 8mm video of his visit. I sent it to him about a year before he died. (I wonder who has it now).
Vic's arm failed while he was there. One of the motors died. He sent me out for some wire. Then he built a new motor from scratch on the Bridgeport in our lab. I was completely impressed.
Vic was later hired to design the Puma. His desk was next to mine.
I got the VAL language from Vic and Bruce Shimano. I modified and extended it to drive our Unimate from a PDP-11/03. It also drove the 2 arm robot for Ford.
Richard (Lou) Paul was at SRI using a Unimate. He taught myself and Bill Perzley how to use DH-Matrices and the Jacobian for robots. I extended VAL to use some of that math.
Later, at IBM Research (with Russ Taylor and others), we worked on AML, the robot used to drive the IBM robot. I worked on the vision subsystem (Gold Filling) and a multi-address space linking loader. I also added networking to link it to the Boca robot. Ralph Hollis left the group and all of that robot work went with him to Carnegie Mellon. I worked at CMU and visited Ralph often.
I researched a "design-to-buid system". The idea is to start with a CAD drawing of an assembly and automatically construct a robot plan to build it. This was used to assemble a flashlight, driven from AML.
Later still, I worked with Scott Fahlman on Robot-Human cooperation to change a car tire. We used a mashup of Scone (Scott's Knowledge base), a modified version of Forgy's RETE algorithm for rules, a modified form of Alice's natural language, machine learning (to recognize lug nuts), and a custom feedback system to dynamically learn new rules and knowledge from interacting with the human.
These days all of my robot work is in ROS.
Tim