Animat are artificial animals; the term is a contraction of "animal" and "materials"[1] (and, coincidentally, also the third-person indicative present of the Latin verb animō[2] which means to "animate, give or bring life"[3]). The term includes physical robots and virtual simulations. The animat model includes features of a simple animal capable of interacting with its environment. It is, therefore, designed to simulate the ability to associate certain signals from the environment within a learning phase that indicate a potential for cognitive structure.[4]
Animat research, a subset of Artificial Life studies, has become rather popular since Rodney Brooks' seminal paper "Intelligence without representation".