What was the name given to Leonardo da Vinci’s human-shaped mechanical device?

Leonardo da Vinci’s human-shaped mechanical device is known as the mechanical knight.

Leonardo designed the figure around 1495 for a pageant in Milan connected with the court of Ludovico Sforza. The knight wore armor and was designed to sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw through an internal system of pulleys, cables, and gears. It is one of the clearest examples of Leonardo applying mechanical engineering to an animated human form.

No complete original machine survives, so historians reconstruct its operation from Leonardo’s drawings and notes. In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working model based on the surviving evidence. His reconstruction helped demonstrate that the mechanism could plausibly perform several of the movements attributed to it.

The device was not a modern robot. It had no electricity, software, or independent decision-making. In historical terms, it was a mechanical automaton: a machine whose programmed motions came from physical components.