Which Leonardo da Vinci design is regarded as an early humanoid robot?

Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical knight is regarded as an early humanoid robot.

Leonardo designed the machine around 1495 for a pageant in Milan organized by Ludovico Sforza. His drawings show an armored figure powered by a system of cables, pulleys, gears, and cranks. The mechanism could reportedly sit, stand, move its arms, and move its head and jaw.

The machine is often called Leonardo’s robot, although “robot” is a modern term. The word itself was not coined until 1920, more than four centuries after Leonardo’s design. The original mechanism did not survive, and its exact performance is therefore reconstructed from Leonardo’s drawings and notes.

In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working interpretation based on the surviving evidence. The reconstruction demonstrated that the design’s internal mechanical structure was plausible, while also showing that it was an automaton rather than a modern programmable robot.