What automated figure did Leonardo da Vinci design to entertain guests at a Milan court?

Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight to entertain guests at the Milanese court.

The machine was a human-shaped automaton covered by armor. Leonardo’s surviving notes and drawings indicate that cams, gears, and connecting parts could make the figure sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its visor or jaw. The design was prepared around 1495 for a court celebration associated with Ludovico Sforza.

It is commonly called Leonardo’s robot or robotic knight, although “robot” is a modern term. The word robot was not coined until the twentieth century, so Leonardo himself would have described the device as a mechanical figure or automaton. The machine was not an artificial intelligence system and had no independent decision-making ability.

The original was not known to survive. In the twentieth century, engineers reconstructed versions from Leonardo’s drawings, and those reconstructions demonstrated that the mechanism was mechanically plausible. The project reveals Leonardo’s combination of anatomy, stage machinery, clockwork, and court entertainment.