What armored humanoid machine did Leonardo da Vinci design around 1495?

Leonardo da Vinci designed Leonardo’s robot, an armored humanoid machine, around 1495.

The design appears in Leonardo’s notebooks and is associated with celebrations at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. It used a system of pulleys, cables, and gears inside a suit of armor. The mechanism was intended to allow movements such as sitting, standing, raising its arms, and moving its head and jaw.

The robot is often called Leonardo’s mechanical knight because its exterior resembled a German-Italian medieval armored knight. It was not an electronic robot: electricity, computers, and programmable control were centuries away. Instead, it was a mechanical automaton operated by internal transmission systems.

In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working interpretation based on Leonardo’s drawings. That reconstruction helped demonstrate that the surviving sketches could describe a physically plausible machine.