What clockwork machine did Leonardo da Vinci design to look like a seated armored knight?

Leonardo da Vinci’s seated, armored clockwork machine is known as Leonardo’s robot.

Leonardo designed the automaton around 1495, probably while working in Milan. The surviving drawings show a mechanical knight covered in armor. A system of pulleys, cables, gears, and an external crank could make the figure sit, stand, move its arms, and move its head and jaw.

The machine may have been intended for a court entertainment or pageant, rather than for practical labor. It was not an artificial-intelligence robot in the modern sense; it was a programmable mechanical automaton whose movements came from carefully arranged mechanisms.

No original machine has survived. In 2002, robotics specialist Mark Rosheim built a reconstruction based on Leonardo’s drawings and notes. The reconstruction demonstrated that the design could plausibly produce several of the described movements.