Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot knight, an automated humanoid machine for a Milanese pageant.
Leonardo developed the design around 1495 while working for Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The machine was placed inside a suit of armor and used a system of pulleys, cables, and gears. It could reportedly sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw through mechanical linkages.
The robot knight was not an artificial-intelligence robot. It was an automaton powered by mechanical motion, and no complete original machine survives. Its reconstruction depends on Leonardo’s drawings and descriptions in surviving notebooks.
In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working model based on Leonardo’s plans. The project helped demonstrate that the design’s linked mechanisms were technically plausible, although the exact original performance remains uncertain.