More than just strange, it's a glaring omission -- MIT Prof. Rod Brooks paved these roads nearly 3 decades ago and arrived at these ideas through deduction and experimentation.

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).