  Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems
is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being
able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or
even making it even more advanced. This can be thought of as a long-term goal
of living technologies and embodied evolution. Current research agenda targets
several short- and middle-term steps towards achieving such a vision:
connection of ICT and bio-/chemo- developments, advances in "soft" and "wet"
robotics, integration of material science into developmental robotics, and
potentially, addressing the self-replication in autonomous systems.
