What named machine did Leonardo da Vinci design as a mechanical knight?

Leonardo da Vinci designed Leonardo’s robot, a mechanical knight powered by a system of pulleys, cables, and gears.

Leonardo appears to have created the machine for a 1495 celebration in Milan organized under Ludovico Sforza. The robot wore armor and was designed to sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw. Its motion came from mechanical linkages rather than an external electrical or steam power source.

The original device was lost, and historians reconstructed its probable mechanism from Leonardo’s notebooks. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on the surviving drawings. The reconstruction showed that the design could perform several human-like movements.

The machine was an automaton, not an artificial-intelligence robot. It could not reason, learn, or act independently in the modern sense. Its importance is that Leonardo applied anatomical observation and mechanical engineering to imitate the movement of a human body.