What early robotic device did Leonardo da Vinci design in armor-shaped form?

Leonardo da Vinci designed an armor-shaped early robotic device called the mechanical knight.

Leonardo created the design around 1495 for a pageant at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The machine was dressed in medieval armor and used a system of pulleys, cables, and gears. Those mechanisms could make the figure sit, stand, raise its visor, and move its arms.

The original device has not survived, and no complete contemporary description proves exactly how it operated. In the 1950s, researchers studying Leonardo’s Codex Madrid manuscripts reconstructed the mechanism and concluded that the drawings contained enough information for a working automaton.

In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a functioning model based on Leonardo’s plans. The machine is called a robot in modern discussions, but it was not an autonomous artificial-intelligence system. It was a programmable mechanical automaton whose movements depended on physical mechanisms and preset settings.