Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight around 1495 that could sit, stand, and move its arms.
The automaton was created during Leonardo’s work for Ludovico Sforza in Milan and was probably intended for a court celebration. Its outer form represented a medieval armored knight. Inside, a system of pulleys, cables, and gears translated movement from operating mechanisms into actions such as raising the arms and moving the head.
No original machine has survived, so the design is known from Leonardo’s notes and from modern research into his drawings. In 2002, engineer Mark Rosheim built a working interpretation based on the surviving evidence. That reconstruction helped show that the mechanism could produce the movements attributed to the design.
The figure is often called Leonardo’s robot, but “robot” is a modern term. The historical object was an automaton: a mechanical figure designed to imitate living movement without being an autonomous electronic machine.