Leonardo da Vinci’s articulated armored machine is known as the robotic knight.
Leonardo designed the robotic knight around 1495, probably for a festival at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The machine was presented as a suit of armor with an internal system of pulleys, cables, and levers. Those mechanisms could make the figure sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its jaw.
The surviving evidence comes from Leonardo’s notebooks, not from a complete original robot. The drawings reveal a sophisticated understanding of how motion could be transmitted through a human-shaped framework. The machine was an automaton: it followed mechanical actions rather than thinking or responding like a modern robot.
The design was reconstructed in the modern era by Mark Rosheim, who published research on Leonardo’s robot and built working versions. “Robotic knight” is a modern descriptive name, while Leonardo’s original notes do not show that he used the modern word robot, which entered English much later.