The PUMA is an industrial robot arm developed by Victor Scheinman

Victor Scheinman

Victor Scheinman is a pioneer in the field of robotics. He is 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...

 at pioneering robot

Robot

A robot is a mechanical or virtual intelligent agent that can perform tasks automatically or with guidance, typically by remote control. In practice a robot is usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by computer and electronic programming. Robots can be autonomous, semi-autonomous or...

 company Unimation. Initially developed for General Motors, the PUMA was based on earlier designs Scheinman invented while at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.

Unimation produced PUMAs for years until being purchased by Westinghouse (ca. 1980), and later by Swiss company Stäubli

Stäubli

Stäubli is an international mechatronics company, primarily known for its textile machinery, connectors and robotics products.-History:...

 (1988). Nokia

Nokia

Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...

 Robotics manufactured about 1500 PUMA robots during the 1980s, the Puma-650 being their most popular model with customers. Some own Nokia Robotics products were also designed, like Nokia NS-16 Industrial Robot. Nokia sold their Robotics division in 1990.

In 2002, General Motors Controls, Robotics and Welding (CRW) organization donated the original prototype PUMA robot to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. It joins a distinguished collection of historically important robots that includes an early Unimate

Unimate

Unimate was the first industrial robot,which worked on a General Motors assembly line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961.It was created by George Devol in the 1950s using his original patents...

and the Odetics Odex 1.