Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical knight that could sit and move its arms.
The design dates to about 1495 and was probably created for a festival or spectacle at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Leonardo’s drawings show an armored figure containing a system of gears, cables, and pulleys. The mechanism could imitate human actions, including moving the arms and operating the head or jaw.
The figure was not an electronic robot. It was a clockwork-style automaton powered by mechanical components and possibly hand-cranked or spring-driven motion. No original mechanical knight has been found, so its exact capabilities remain based on Leonardo’s drawings and modern interpretations.
In 2002, Mark Rosheim built a reconstruction using the surviving designs. The knight is separate from Leonardo’s self-propelled cart, another machine sometimes loosely called a robot. Both show his interest in automata, but only the knight was designed in humanoid form.