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.
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).
Great guy. Here's an anecdote from that time. He spent a few months on sabbatical at our lab ( https://ai.vub.ac.be/ ) in those days. We were preparing robots for a NATO Advanced Study Institute ( https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642796319 ), and I was struggling writing the serial driver for a custom embedded computer for this as the system kept crashing (due to a bug in the dram controller). Anyways, Rod Brooks, offered to help me with the coding. It wasn't needed as the code was not the problem, but I don't know many professors that could and would be prepared to dive in that deep.
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).