What walking machine did Leonardo da Vinci design to imitate a human rider’s movement?

Leonardo da Vinci’s walking machine was the mechanical knight.

Leonardo designed the automaton in Milan around 1495, probably for a festival organized by Ludovico Sforza. The machine wore armor and was operated by an internal system of gears, cables, and pulleys. Its mechanisms were intended to move the arms and produce human-like actions while the figure sat or stood within the armor.

No complete original machine has survived, and historians reconstructed its operation from Leonardo’s drawings and notes. In 2002, engineer Mark Rosheim built a working model based on those studies. The reconstruction demonstrated that the design could produce several movements, although it was not a modern autonomous robot.

The name “robot” is useful as a comparison, but it is anachronistic in Leonardo’s context. His mechanical knight belonged to the Renaissance tradition of courtly automata and theatrical machines.