Leonardo da Vinci designed a humanoid automaton known as the mechanical knight.
The machine was probably created for a festival organized by Ludovico Sforza in Milan around 1495. Leonardo's surviving notes and sketches indicate that an armored figure could sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw through a system of pulleys, cables, and gears.
No original mechanical knight has survived, and the evidence comes from Leonardo's notebooks rather than a complete contemporary machine. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a reconstruction based on the drawings. The model showed that the proposed mechanisms were mechanically plausible.
The mechanical knight is often described as the first humanoid robot, but that phrase is a modern historical comparison. It was an automaton driven by mechanical linkages, not an electronic robot with sensors or artificial intelligence. Its significance is Leonardo's attempt to reproduce coordinated human movement using Renaissance engineering.