Which Leonardo da Vinci design is often called the first mechanical robot?

Leonardo da Vinci’s robot knight is often called the first mechanical robot.

Leonardo designed the humanoid machine in 1495 while working in Milan for Ludovico Sforza. The knight wore armour and was intended to sit, stand, move its arms, and operate its jaw through a system of pulleys, cables, gears, and cranks. It was probably created for a court pageant rather than as a practical worker.

No original robot survives, and historians reconstruct its mechanism from Leonardo’s drawings and notes. In the 1950s, researchers identified important sketches in the Codex Madrid I, helping clarify how the internal system may have worked. Modern reconstructions have demonstrated that the basic movements were mechanically plausible.

The robot knight was not an autonomous artificial-intelligence machine. It depended on mechanical power and prearranged linkages. The word “robot” itself was coined much later, in the 20th century, but the invention is remembered as an early programmable-looking automaton.