What Leonardo da Vinci invention was a humanoid automaton wearing medieval armor?

Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid armored automaton was the mechanical knight.

Leonardo designed the machine around 1495 for a pageant at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The figure wore medieval armor and was designed to sit, stand, move its arms, and move its head and jaw. Cables and pulleys inside the armor translated the motion of a hand-operated mechanism into movements that looked human.

The machine is often called Leonardo’s robot, although the word robot was coined much later and the device was not autonomous in the modern sense. It was an automaton: a machine that performs movements through a prepared mechanical system. Leonardo’s anatomical studies likely helped him think about joints, leverage, and coordinated motion.

No original mechanical knight survives. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo’s drawings and related notes. The reconstruction helped show that the concept was mechanically plausible, while also highlighting how much remains uncertain about the original construction.