Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot knight to imitate human movement in a 1495 automaton.
The machine was a human-shaped mechanical figure wearing armor. Leonardo’s drawings show an internal system of pulleys, cables, and gears that could make the figure sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its jaw. The design was probably connected with a court celebration in Milan.
Leonardo’s robot was not an electronic robot and did not have artificial intelligence. In Renaissance usage, an automaton meant a self-moving machine operated by mechanical power. The knight’s movements came from carefully arranged components inside its torso, not from a computer or electric motor.
The robot was reconstructed in the modern era from Leonardo’s sketches and technical notes. Those reconstructions helped show that the design was mechanically plausible. It is therefore best described as an early humanoid automaton or mechanical knight.