What Leonardo da Vinci invention was a humanoid machine known as Leonardo’s robot?

Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid machine was a mechanical knight.

Leonardo designed the robot around 1495 for a pageant in Milan commissioned by Ludovico Sforza. The machine wore medieval armor and was built around a system of pulleys, cables, and gears. According to reconstructions of the drawings, it could sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw.

The original machine has not survived, and no contemporary report confirms every movement attributed to it. The design was rediscovered in Leonardo’s notebooks centuries later. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working model based on the surviving diagrams, helping demonstrate how the mechanism might have operated.

It is called a robot in modern accounts, but Leonardo did not use that modern term. The word “robot” was coined in the twentieth century. “Mechanical knight” is the more historically descriptive name for Leonardo’s armored automaton.