Leonardo da Vinci’s self-propelled mechanical figure in the form of a knight was the robotic knight.
Leonardo designed the humanoid machine around 1495 for a pageant in Milan organized under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza. Its armored exterior was controlled by an internal system of pulleys, cables, gears, and levers. The machine could reportedly sit, stand, move its arms, and move its jaw.
The design was discovered in Leonardo’s notebooks rather than in a surviving Renaissance machine. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working interpretation using the drawings. That reconstruction showed that the mechanism could produce several of the movements Leonardo planned.
The robotic knight is often called a robot, although that modern term did not exist in Leonardo’s time. It was an automaton: a machine designed to perform movements automatically or through concealed mechanical controls, not an intelligent computer-controlled robot.