Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight, a human-shaped mechanical soldier, for a Milan festival in 1495.
The machine was created during Leonardo’s work for Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan. Drawings and notes indicate that an internal system of cables, gears, and pulleys could make the knight sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its jaw. Its armor was modeled on a medieval Italian-German armored suit.
The robot was not an electronic robot in the modern sense. It was an automaton powered by mechanical transmission, and its movements would have been limited and preprogrammed. No original machine has survived, so historians reconstruct its operation from Leonardo’s anatomical and mechanical sketches.
In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working interpretation based on Leonardo’s notes. The reconstruction helped demonstrate that the design was mechanically plausible. The robotic knight is therefore best understood as an early humanoid automaton, not a modern autonomous machine.