What was the name of Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical knight?

Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical knight is known as Leonardo’s robot.

Leonardo designed the humanoid machine around 1495, probably for a pageant at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Drawings in Leonardo’s notebooks show a knight in armor whose internal system of pulleys, cables, and gears could make coordinated movements.

The machine may have been able to sit, stand, move its arms, and open and close its jaw. Because no original robot has survived, historians reconstruct its likely operation from Leonardo’s sketches rather than from a complete working artifact.

It is often described as an early humanoid robot, but the modern word “robot” did not exist in Leonardo’s time. The term was introduced centuries later in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. Leonardo’s design was mechanical automation, not an electronic or programmable robot.