Animat
Animat (third-person indicative present of the Latin verb animā́re), meaning to "animate, give or bring life".
Animats are artificial animals, a contraction of animal-materials. The term includes physical robots and virtual simulations. Animat research, a subset of Artificial Life studies, has become rather popular since Rodney Brooks' seminal paper "Intelligence without representation". The word was coined by S.W. Wilson in 1985,
in "Knowledge growth in an artificial animal", published in the first Proceedings
of an International Conference on Genetic Algorithms and Their Applications.