Which Leonardo da Vinci machine was an early design for a robot in human form?

Leonardo da Vinci’s early human-shaped robot design was the mechanical knight. He developed the concept around 1495 while working in Milan for Ludovico Sforza, where court entertainments and mechanical displays were part of his responsibilities.

The knight was designed to sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw through a system of pulleys, cables, and gears. The internal mechanism was placed inside armor modeled on a German-Italian suit of armor. Leonardo’s drawings show that the machine was meant to imitate selected human movements rather than think or act independently.

The original robot has not survived, but engineers built reconstructions in the 21st century using Leonardo’s surviving notes and sketches. It is often called a robot in modern summaries, although the word “robot” was coined centuries later, in a 1920 Czech play.