Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight as an armored automaton for a Milanese court festival.
Leonardo’s notes and sketches from around 1495 show a humanoid machine covered in armor. Internal cables, pulleys, and mechanical linkages were arranged so that the figure could perform movements such as sitting, standing, and moving its arms. The design was probably connected with a planned pageant or ceremonial spectacle for Ludovico Sforza’s court in Milan.
The machine is often called Leonardo’s robot, but that modern label can be misleading. It was a clockwork-style automaton with human-operated or mechanically powered movement, not an electronic robot and not an autonomous artificial intelligence system.
No original automaton has survived, and scholars reconstructed its operation from Leonardo’s drawings. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working interpretation that demonstrated several proposed motions. The reconstruction helped show that the design was mechanically plausible for its period.