High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Animats are artificial animals, a contraction of anima-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 1991, in the first proceedings of the Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour, which was also called From Animals to Animats.