What mechanical figure did Leonardo da Vinci design around 1495 as a programmable humanoid machine?

Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight around 1495 as a programmable humanoid machine.

The drawing was prepared for a festival in Milan organized under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo’s knight wore armor and was designed to sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw through a system of gears, cables, and pulleys.

The machine was not an intelligent robot. It had no electronic controls or independent reasoning; its actions would have been mechanically programmed through the arrangement of internal parts. The surviving notes are incomplete, so modern reconstructions necessarily interpret some details.

In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo’s drawings. The project helped demonstrate that the design contained a plausible mechanical structure, although it did not prove that the original was completed or publicly operated.