Leonardo da Vinci designed a jointed automaton with armor, often called the mechanical knight.
Leonardo’s robot design dates to around 1495 and was prepared in connection with festivities at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The machine was intended to sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw through an internal system of pulleys, cables, and gears. Its armor gave it the appearance of a medieval knight rather than a human-shaped laboratory robot.
The surviving evidence is a set of drawings rather than a complete original machine. In 2002, robotics engineer Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo’s plans. That reconstruction supported the interpretation that the mechanism could perform the movements shown in the notebooks.
Calling it the first robot is popular but requires care. Earlier cultures built automata, and the word “robot” itself is modern. Leonardo’s design is nevertheless an important early example of a programmable-looking humanoid mechanism based on mechanical transmission.