Leonardo da Vinci's robot knight was a mechanical figure designed to sit, stand, move its arms, and operate its jaw.
Leonardo created the design around 1495 for a pageant at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. It was housed in armor and controlled by an internal system of cables, pulleys, and gears. The mechanism translated movement from a central operating system into actions resembling those of a human figure.
The robot knight is known mainly from Leonardo's notebooks, especially drawings examined by modern researchers in the 20th century. No original machine has survived, so details of its performance cannot be confirmed directly. Engineers have built reconstructions using the surviving diagrams and have shown that several of the proposed movements are mechanically plausible.
It was an automaton, not a modern programmable robot. It had no electronic sensors, computer, or artificial intelligence. Its importance comes from applying mechanical engineering to imitate human motion centuries before modern robotics.