What Leonardo da Vinci invention was a robot shaped like a medieval armored knight?

Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid machine is known as Leonardo’s robot.

Leonardo designed the mechanical knight around 1495 for a festival in Milan organized by Ludovico Sforza. The machine was dressed in armor and arranged so that internal gears, cables, and pulleys could produce human-like movements. Reconstructions indicate that it could sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw.

The original mechanism was lost for centuries. In 1950, Leonardo’s drawings of the design were found in the Codex Madrid I, allowing researchers to study the machine more closely. Modern reconstructions have tested how the linked mechanisms may have worked.

The word “robot” is modern and was not used by Leonardo. The term comes from the Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. Leonardo’s machine is therefore more precisely an automaton or mechanical knight, although “Leonardo’s robot” is the established popular name.