He can't flip pancakes, fold clothes or walk on the moon.

You wouldn't rely on him for a compatibility rating on your chances of love with a stranger and he definitely can't project holographic distress calls from Rebel princesses.

But to be fair, Leonardo Da Vinci's robot is more than 500 years old.

And actually, he probably could flip pancakes, with some minor tweaks.

Da Vinci's "Mechanical Knight" is on display - along with many other inventions from the mind of one of the greatest artists of all time - at the Sydney Town Hall.

It works - and without humans cranking the wheels.

Just as today's robots source their power from batteries, or fuel, or the sun, Da Vinci's robot was entirely capable of performing its task without human help.

According to exhibition manager Luigi Rizzo, a hollow tube running up the knight's spine would have held a shaft, connected at the knight's feet to another shaft running out of sight behind a curtain or a wall.

Outside, it would be driven by a propellor, powered either by wind or running water.

Fixed, yes, but fully automated in all other respects.

The knight's purpose was not military - there have been plenty of fanciful notions about Da Vinci's army of metal knights.

This knight was for entertainment, or ceremony and how the Artisans of Florence - who put the robot together - know this is an insight into the astonishing mind of the man whose study of the human body gave him such a complete understanding of it, he began to build one.

The main blueprint for the robot which was uncovered from one of Da Vinci's Codices, has between 16-20 designs drawn onto it.

Most have nothing to do with the robot - it's how Da Vinci kept his secrets safe. Medieval copyright, as Mr Rizzo describes it.

All the designs were given to artisans to build for Da Vinci. Some worked, the rest were simply added to the mix to confuse those constructing the parts or any prying eyes.

The modern day Artisans, who now go by the name of "TeknoArt", weren't so easy to fool.

Headed by Gabriele Niccolai, who played in the ruins of Da Vinci's birth home as a child, TeknoArt have spent more than a decade assembling the robot, purely on Mr Niccolai's insight into Da Vinci's seemingly random designs.

A sketch of some weights on ropes and pulleys which to anyone else could be simple scales, to Mr Gabrieli mimic leg motions.

Where we see cogs and springs, Mr Gabrieli sees arms and tendons. Enough so that after 15 years of studying the main drawing and linking it to pieces of other drawings, the team eventually built a skeleton.

Except that for a long time after, it was a skeleton that didn't work. Everything was connected, but none of it moved without torturous friction on the ropes holding it together.

Da Vinci's robot had no rhythm.

At this stage, Mr Rizzo said it would have been nice to be able to say genius solved the problem, but the reality was that it was pure speculation that brought the knight to life.

One of the sketches on the blueprint that was overlooked (throw out the useless sketches and you're left with the invention, Mr Rizzo says) was of a drum.

Mr Gabrieli eventually linked the drum with the knight's arrms and found the sketch of the mechanism which showed how Da Vinci wanted it built.

That machine beat a perfect tattoo when he wound the handle at the back, but even more surprising was what happened when that drum was placed in the robot's chest.

The cylinder suddenly, magically, became its heart. The rhythm it gave the knight caused all the other parts to work in perfect unison, without a hint of friction.

Da Vinci's robot came alive, arms and legs lifting and dropping in time with the drum. By replacing the cyclinder with one cut with different grooves, it would even change tempo.

Mr Rizzo said that remarkable though it is, even the robot is not Da Vinci's greatest mechanical achievement.

At the moment, that honour belongs to the Drone - a type of flying machine - but another sketch on the robot blueprint has everyone at TeknoArt convinced they have unlocked the first part of the mythical "mechanical lion".

Visitors to the Da Vinci home have recorded that they had seen drawings of the fully automated beast, and finally, Mr Rizzo revealed, TeknoArt has identified the first piece.

It's just a sketch for a mechanical limb, but it's definitely not a human limb, Mr Rizzo said, and that's enough for the Artisans to know that Da Vinci's mechanical lion is not just a myth.

Now it's just a matter of Mr Gabrieli and his team scanning the remaining 20,000 of Da Vinci's Codices for the other parts.

Given that the robot took 15 years to piece together, don't expect Da Vinci's lion to be touring the world soon, but when it does come together, Mr Rizzo promises it will be "spectacular".

The question that remains is, what was in the estimated 55,000 pages of Da Vinci's Codices that were lost?