By NATALIE ANGIER


CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts - Today’s experimental robots bear little resemblance to the androids of our fantasies.

That reflects a larger truth in the field of robotics, the attempt to build thinking machines that can perceive the world around them and then act on that awareness. Researchers are far, far from being able to design a robot with human capabilities.

Ask a human toddler to bring you the red ball from behind the sofa, and the toddler will comply. Ask a machine to perform the same seemingly mundane task- “We’re not even close,” said Seth Teller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“We can’t do a dog,” said his colleague Leslie P.Kaelbling.“We’d all be so happy if we could do something with the fetching skills of a dog.”

But they can do helicopters, of a sort. In the robotics laboratory at M.I.T., Dr.Nicholas Roy described one of his team’s most promising projects, a line of “intelligent helicopters” that could be used to help out at disaster sites or war zones.

The airborne robots are designed to operate autonomously, he explained, to maneuver through urban environments, fly around in buildings and show you what’s inside.“Do you want to see what one looks like-” he asked.

A moment later he returned with something cute and bouncy balanced on the palm of his hand. It was basically a little cube attached to a cross, outfitted with a series of small plastic propellers, some lights and wires and a rudder that looked like a popsicle stick.

“It may not look like Hollywood, but the age of robotics is upon us,” said Daniela Rus of M.I.T.“Robots are involved in many everyday aspects of life, even if we don’t realize it.”

The word comes from the Czech“robota,”meaning slave, and, yes, we have our robot slaves. Factory robots encapsulate our drugs, sequence our genes, fabricate our chips, monitor our radiation, spot weld and spray paint our cars, load bricks, rivet bolts, run nuts, make glass, die cast, sand blast. Remotely operated vehicles rove the surface of Mars.

At M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, researchers are striving both to improve existing approaches to robotics and to make great leaps forward.

In Dr.Rus’s advanced robotics class, students are designing a robotics garden, a plot of a half-dozen or so tomato plants serviced entirely by robots. Next to each plant is a wireless router that measures soil humidity every 10 seconds and is programmed with a computer model of how tomato plants grow. That information is conveyed to surveillance robots that wheel around the perimeter of the plot, each bearing a metal arm threaded through with a watering tube and a pincered hand for weeding, cleaning away dead leaves and plucking off the tomatoes as they ripen.

A plant can call a robot over and complain that its soil is not moist enough, Dr.Rus said. The project is in its early stages, but her hopes are high.

As she sees it, the agricultural industry, with its backbreaking tasks and its reliance on pesticides and fertilizers, could use the methodical touch of a robot tuned to hear the plants cry.