Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot knight, a human-like mechanical figure enclosed in armor.
He created the concept around 1495 while working in Milan, probably for a court entertainment or pageant. The surviving notes and sketches indicate that cables, pulleys, gears, and a supporting structure could make the figure sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its jaw.
The machine was not a robot in the modern electronic sense. It had no computer, sensors, or autonomous programming. Its movements would have been produced mechanically by an operator or by carefully arranged linkages. The term robot was applied later because the device is an early example of a humanoid automaton.
The original machine has not survived, and scholars reconstructed its likely form from Leonardo’s drawings. In 2002, robotics expert Mark Rosheim built a working interpretation. The reconstruction helped demonstrate that the design’s basic movements were mechanically plausible.