Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight, a human-shaped mechanical automaton capable of several movements.
He developed the design in Milan around 1495 for a pageant or court entertainment connected with Ludovico Sforza. The machine wore a suit of armor and used a system of pulleys, cables, gears, and a control mechanism inside the torso. Reconstructions indicate that it could sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw.
Leonardo’s original machine has not survived, and no contemporary account definitively documents a public performance. The design was rediscovered in the 1950s in Leonardo’s notebooks. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working model based on the surviving drawings and notes.
The device is often described as a robot, although the word robot belongs to the twentieth century. Historically, it was an automaton: a self-moving mechanical figure designed to imitate human action rather than a programmable electronic machine.