I think Brooks' Cog initiative was an attempt to 'ground' the robot's perceptions of the physical world into forming a rich scalable representation model. But it looks like that line of investigation ended ~2003 with Brooks' retirement. Too bad, given the seeming suitability of using deep nets to implement it.
I agree. Google has come out with some papers that are, to put it harshly, basic gluing together of DL models followed by loads of training on their compute resources.
