Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot knight, a mechanical figure that could sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw.
He developed the design in Milan around 1495, probably for a pageant or court celebration held by Ludovico Sforza. The machine’s internal system used cables, pulleys, and gears operated by a hand crank. Its armor made the mechanism resemble a medieval knight rather than an abstract automaton.
No original robot knight survives, and the design was reconstructed from Leonardo’s technical drawings in the 2000s. Those reconstructions demonstrated that the figure could perform several of the movements suggested by the sketches.
Calling it a robot uses a modern term. Leonardo created an automaton, meaning a machine capable of movement through its own internal mechanism, not an electronic or programmable robot.