Leonardo da Vinci’s human-shaped mechanical automaton designed around 1495 is commonly called the robot knight.
Leonardo developed the machine for a pageant or entertainment event held in Milan under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza. Notes and sketches show a life-sized armored figure able to sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its jaw through an internal system of pulleys, cables, and gears. The mechanism was concealed beneath armor, making the figure appear to move like a person.
The name “robot knight” is modern rather than a phrase Leonardo is known to have used. The surviving drawings do not provide a complete construction manual, so historians reconstruct its operation from the anatomical and mechanical sketches. In 2002, Mark Rosheim built a working model based on Leonardo’s notes; it demonstrated that the design could produce several of the proposed movements.
This automaton is often confused with Leonardo’s mechanical lion, another courtly spectacle associated with him. The knight was a humanoid machine, not an early industrial robot in the modern electronic sense.