Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight in 1495 to resemble a medieval armored soldier.
The machine was probably created for a pageant at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Hidden mechanisms, including cables and pulleys, allowed the figure to sit, stand, move its arms, and move its jaw. It was not an autonomous robot in the modern electronic sense; it was a mechanical automaton operated by an internal system of gears and cables.
The design was reconstructed in the 20th century from Leonardo’s notebooks. Engineers found that the surviving sketches contained enough information to build a working version. The reconstruction helped confirm that the knight was more than an imaginative drawing.
The robotic knight is sometimes confused with Leonardo’s mechanical lion. The lion was a separate ceremonial automaton, while the knight was human-shaped and associated with military pageantry.