See for example Brook's classic "Elephants don't play chess", or Steel's write up on "The Artificial Life roots of Artificial Intelligence"
He made the argument that embodiment is an essential component of AI in his paper "Intelligence Without Reason" ( https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/AIM-1293.pdf ) COG was his groups' attempt to build a humanoid robot: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/o... (see "Why not simulate it?") but he and his grad-student researchers devoted considerable effort to exploring the importance of embodiment, especially in humanoids: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/index...
The Mobile Robots Lab built biologically inspired robots that were remarkably capable and able to function to dynamic events in the real world (rather than carefully controlled lab environments).