What was Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid mechanical creation called?

Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid mechanical creation is known as the mechanical knight. He designed it around 1495, probably for a festival organized at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan.

The knight was intended to sit, stand, raise its visor, and move its arms through a system of pulleys, cables, gears, and levers. Leonardo’s surviving notes and sketches reveal an understanding of human anatomy that helped him arrange the machine’s joints and internal framework.

No complete original robot has survived, so its exact performance remains uncertain. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on Leonardo’s drawings and research, helping demonstrate that several of the proposed movements were mechanically plausible.

The mechanical knight is often described as a robot, although that modern term did not exist in Renaissance Italy. It was an automaton: a machine designed to move by itself through mechanical programming.