What mechanical figure did Leonardo da Vinci design with armor and movable limbs?

Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight with armor and movable limbs.

The design was created around 1495 for a festival in Milan held under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo’s surviving notes and drawings indicate that the figure used a system of cables, pulleys, and gears inside an armored shell. Those mechanisms could make the knight sit, stand, raise its visor, and move its arms.

It was not a robot in the modern electronic sense. The figure was a mechanical automaton powered by human or stored mechanical force. No complete original machine survives, so historians reconstruct its appearance and capabilities from Leonardo’s notebooks.

In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on the drawings. The project helped demonstrate that Leonardo’s mechanism was mechanically plausible. The knight is often considered an important early example of humanoid automaton design.