What Leonardo da Vinci machine was a mechanical knight capable of moving its arms?

Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight capable of moving its arms.

The machine was a humanoid automaton covered in armor and powered by a system of cables, pulleys, and gears. Leonardo’s drawings from around 1495 show how the internal mechanism could produce movements such as raising the arms and moving the head and jaw.

The knight is associated with festivities at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan, although surviving evidence does not conclusively prove that the exact machine was built and displayed there. The reconstruction by engineer Mark Rosheim in 2002 was based on Leonardo’s notebooks and demonstrated that the mechanism was mechanically plausible.

It was not a robot in the modern electronic sense. It had no computer, sensors, or electric motor. The term “robotic knight” refers to a programmable-looking mechanical automaton operated by physical mechanisms.