Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot knight, a mechanical humanoid intended for a 1495 celebration in Milan.
The machine was probably created for festivities held by the court of Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo’s surviving notes and anatomical studies show a knight in armor with mechanisms that could make movements such as sitting, standing, and moving its arms. The design used cables, pulleys, and a supporting frame to reproduce selected human actions.
Leonardo’s original machine has not survived, so its exact capabilities remain uncertain. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a reconstruction based on Leonardo’s drawings and reported that the mechanism could perform several of the proposed movements. That reconstruction helped demonstrate that the design was mechanically plausible.
The robot was not an autonomous artificial intelligence system. It was an automaton, meaning a machine whose programmed mechanical actions could run without continuous direct manipulation. The term “robot” is modern, but it is widely used for this famous Leonardo invention.