Leonardo da Vinci designed a humanoid robot for a Milan court spectacle around 1495.
The machine was an armored figure that could sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw through a system of cables, pulleys, and gears. Leonardo prepared the design while working for Ludovico Sforza in Milan, where elaborate mechanical entertainments were part of court culture.
No contemporary record proves that the robot was completed or performed exactly as the drawings suggest. The design was rediscovered in Leonardo’s notebooks centuries later, and modern researchers reconstructed it to study the mechanisms. Those reconstructions show that the movements are mechanically plausible.
Calling it a robot uses a modern term. Leonardo’s device was an automaton: a machine that performs programmed movements without a human inside it. It was not an electronic robot, artificial intelligence system, or autonomous machine in the modern sense. Its importance is its early combination of human anatomy, mechanical control, and theatrical engineering.