What was Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid machine commonly called?

Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid machine is commonly called the robotic knight.

Leonardo designed the machine around 1495, probably for a pageant or court entertainment organized by Ludovico Sforza in Milan. The figure wore armor and was intended to sit, stand, move its arms, and operate its jaw through a system of gears, cables, and pulleys. It was not a programmable robot in the modern electronic sense.

The design was reconstructed from Leonardo’s notes and drawings by robotics researcher Mark Rosheim in the 1990s. A later full-scale reconstruction was displayed and operated, demonstrating that the mechanism could perform several of the movements suggested by the surviving plans.

The phrase robotic knight is a modern shorthand, while Leonardo himself did not use the word robot; that term was introduced much later. The machine matters because it applies principles of human anatomy and mechanical articulation to a self-moving figure, linking Renaissance automata with the history of robotics.