What Leonardo da Vinci automaton was built as an armored mechanical knight?

Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical knight was an automaton designed to look and move like an armored human figure.

Leonardo created the design around 1495, during work associated with a pageant for Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The surviving drawings show a complex internal system of cables, pulleys, and gears operated by a hand crank. The mechanism could make the figure sit, stand, move its arms, and move its head and jaw.

The knight was dressed in armor and may have been intended as a spectacular court entertainment rather than a practical machine. It is often called Leonardo's robot, although the word robot was coined much later and the device was a programmable-looking automaton, not an electronic robot.

In 2002, robotics expert Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo's sketches. The reconstruction supported the idea that the design was mechanically feasible. The original historical object has not survived, so modern versions necessarily interpret incomplete evidence.