Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical knight is known as Leonardo’s robot.
Leonardo designed the humanoid machine around 1495 while working for Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Its internal system of gears, cables, and pulleys was intended to let the armored figure perform movements such as sitting, standing, and moving its arms.
The design may have been connected with a pageant or festival honoring the Sforza court. No original robot survives, and historians reconstruct its operation from Leonardo’s drawings and notes rather than from a surviving machine.
It is often called a robot in modern writing, although the word “robot” was coined centuries later. In Leonardo’s time, it would have been understood as an automaton: a self-moving mechanical device.