Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical knight had two legs. The design, often called Leonardo’s robot, shows a humanoid automaton intended to sit or stand inside armor and perform movements such as raising its arms and moving its head and jaw.
Leonardo developed the concept around 1495 while working in Milan for Ludovico Sforza. The machine was probably intended for a court spectacle or festival. Its internal system used cables, pulleys, and gears connected to a hand-operated mechanism, rather than an electric motor or modern computer control.
The knight is different from Leonardo’s self-propelled cart, which was a wheeled vehicle. It is also separate from the mechanical lion associated with French royal entertainment. The surviving drawings are incomplete, so some details of the original mechanism remain uncertain.
In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working interpretation based on Leonardo’s notes. The reconstruction demonstrated that the articulated humanoid concept could produce several plausible movements, although it was not proof that every detail of the original machine had been completed.