Leonardo da Vinci's robot knight was a humanoid machine designed as a mechanical armored figure.
Leonardo created the design around 1495 for a pageant in Milan sponsored by Ludovico Sforza. The figure wore armor and was designed to sit, stand, raise its visor, and move its arms. Internal cables and pulleys connected to a central operating mechanism translated the motion of a crank into the knight's movements.
The original robot has not survived, and historians reconstructed its likely operation from Leonardo's drawings and notes. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working model based on the surviving evidence. The reconstruction showed that Leonardo's mechanism could plausibly produce the reported motions.
The robot knight was an automaton, not an autonomous robot in the modern electronic sense. It had no computer, sensors, or independent decision-making. Its importance comes from the sophisticated mechanical transmission Leonardo designed inside a human-shaped shell.