What Leonardo da Vinci invention was a human-shaped automaton designed around 1495?

Leonardo da Vinci’s human-shaped automaton designed around 1495 is known as the robotic knight.

Leonardo prepared the design while working for Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The knight wore armor and was intended to perform humanlike movements, including sitting, standing, moving its arms, and operating its jaw. Cables, pulleys, gears, and other mechanical linkages inside the armor controlled the actions.

The design was probably connected with a large court celebration in Milan. Leonardo’s notebooks contain enough technical information for modern researchers to reconstruct the mechanism, although the surviving drawings do not provide every construction detail. In 2002, the engineer Mark Rosheim built a working model based on Leonardo’s plans.

The robotic knight was not an electronic robot and did not possess independent intelligence. In this historical context, “robot” means a machine capable of automated movement. It is also separate from Leonardo’s self-propelled cart, which was a wheeled vehicle powered by springs rather than a walking, human-shaped automaton.