Epilogue Leonardo’s Legacy and Impact on Modern Technology

Abstract

Leonardo’s life-long career as a roboticist would bridge the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Leonardo’s relationship with his teacher Verrocchio was doubtless the foundation of his work with robots. Perhaps Leonardo even sought to outperform his mentor, striving for even greater technological glory. Not surprisingly, it would take exactly that type of teacher/student relationship in our modern time to reassemble Leonardo’s lost robots. Obviously in love with the technological challenges of mechanisms, Leonardo at an early age shows an astonishing grasp of how to integrate multiple subsystems to accomplish his goal of a self-propelled, compact programmable automaton, perhaps located in the base of a mechanical lion, which would follow a prescribed pattern. In mid-life, he would create an animatronic knight, also for entertainment purposes. Towards the end of his life, he would invent a hydraulic clock in homage to the clepsydras of the ancients but with very modern concepts of components and packaging.