Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical knight appeared to be wearing armor.
The machine was designed in 1495 for a pageant at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Leonardo’s drawings show a human-shaped figure enclosed in a suit of armor, with an internal system of cables, pulleys, and levers connected to a control mechanism.
The robot was intended to imitate basic human movements. Reconstructions based on Leonardo’s surviving sketches have shown that the knight could sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw when its internal mechanisms were operated.
It is often called Leonardo’s robot, but the term “robot” was coined much later, in the twentieth century. “Mechanical knight” better describes the Renaissance device and emphasizes that it was a theatrical automaton rather than an autonomous modern robot.