What Leonardo da Vinci machine is often described as an early humanoid robot?

Leonardo da Vinci’s machine is often described as the robot knight.

Leonardo designed the machine around 1495 for a pageant in Milan organized under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza. His drawings show an armored figure driven by a system of pulleys, cables, and gears. The mechanism could reportedly perform human-like movements such as sitting, standing, and moving its arms.

The robot was not an electronic robot and did not act autonomously by modern standards. It was a mechanical automaton, meaning that its actions came from a carefully arranged mechanism. For many years, historians knew about the design mainly through notebook evidence rather than a surviving original.

In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo’s drawings. The reconstruction helped demonstrate that the design’s articulated movements were mechanically plausible.