What type of armor did Leonardo da Vinci design for his mechanical knight?

Leonardo da Vinci designed his mechanical knight to wear plate armor.

The automaton was planned in Milan around 1495, probably for a court celebration organized under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo's drawings show a humanoid framework inside a suit of Italian-style plate armor. Cables and pulleys connected the internal mechanisms to movements such as raising its arms and moving its head and jaw.

The knight is often called Leonardo's robot, but that modern label can suggest abilities beyond the historical design. It was an automaton: a mechanically operated figure intended for limited, programmed motions, not an autonomous machine with modern artificial intelligence.

The original device has not survived. In 2002, Mark Rosheim built a reconstruction from Leonardo's plans, and later museum versions helped demonstrate how the internal mechanism may have worked.