Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight, an armored humanoid automaton driven by cables and pulleys.
The design was reconstructed from drawings and notes discovered in the Codex Atlanticus and other Leonardo documents. Its internal mechanism could make movements such as sitting, standing, raising its arms, and moving its head and jaw. The machine wore armor modeled on a German-Italian medieval knight.
Leonardo probably created the concept for court entertainment rather than for warfare. It is associated with the celebrations held for Ludovico Sforza in Milan around 1495, when mechanical spectacles and theatrical machines were valuable forms of display.
The robot was not a modern programmable robot. It had no electronic controls and depended on mechanical transmission, with motion determined by the arrangement of cams, ropes, and levers. In 2002, Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo’s surviving evidence, helping show that the mechanism was mechanically plausible.