What mechanical automaton did Leonardo da Vinci design as a knight in armor?

Leonardo da Vinci’s armored automaton is known as Leonardo’s mechanical knight.

Leonardo designed the machine in 1495, probably for a theatrical spectacle at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The internal mechanism used a system of pulleys, cables, gears, and levers that could make the armored figure sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw. It was a mechanical performer rather than an autonomous robot in the modern electronic sense.

The original device disappeared, and historians reconstructed its design from Leonardo’s notebooks. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working version based on those drawings. The project demonstrated that Leonardo’s mechanism was technically plausible and helped establish the mechanical knight as one of his most notable inventions.