What Leonardo da Vinci machine is known as a mechanical knight?

Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical knight is known as Leonardo’s robot.

Leonardo designed the humanoid machine around 1495 for a festival organized by Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The armored figure was intended to sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw through an internal system of cables, pulleys, and gears. Its structure was based partly on Leonardo’s studies of human anatomy and mechanical movement.

No original mechanical knight has survived, and historians cannot prove that the complete design was built in Leonardo’s lifetime. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim constructed a working model based on Leonardo’s drawings and notes. Later reconstructions have helped show that the mechanism was feasible.

The machine was not a robot in the modern electronic sense. It had no computer, sensors, or independent reasoning. The word is useful as a modern description of an automaton: a machine that performs programmed or mechanically controlled movements. Its likely purpose was spectacle, not military combat.