Leonardo da Vinci’s human-shaped mechanical figure for a Milan court spectacle was the robot knight.
Leonardo designed the machine around 1495 while working for Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Its internal system of cables, pulleys, and gears was intended to let an armored figure perform human-like actions, including sitting, standing, and moving its arms.
The design is known from Leonardo’s notebooks rather than from a surviving original. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working model based on the drawings and demonstrated that the mechanism could perform several of the proposed movements.
The term robot is modern; Leonardo would have regarded the device as an automaton or mechanical figure. It was not an artificial intelligence system and did not think independently. Its importance is that it applied anatomical observation and mechanical transmission to a theatrical human-form machine.