Sure enough, after Dr. Roy’s students had fiddled with the settings and circuits on one of their smart cubes, the copterette shuddered to life, its propellers buzzed, and, like Disney’s Tinkerbell meets Star Trek’s Nomad, it began to jerkily, chirpily, rise up and fly.

That today’s experimental robots bear little physical resemblance to our fantasy androids 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 Rosie Jetson or a Data, or even a Diaper Data. You can 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 ho-hum task? “We’re not even close,” said Seth Teller of M.I.T.

“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.”

At the same time, robots have snuck up from behind. “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 and plumb the maritime depths. Some of us own frankly robotic devices like the Roomba, or would except that we’ve been warned not to because we have fringed carpets.

Image GREEN THUMBS In a class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a robot will water a tomato plant when the plant makes a request. The plot of a half-dozen or so plants is serviced entirely by robots. Credit... C. J. Gunther for The New York Times

Moreover, by toting around computationally astute devices like iPhones, BlackBerrys and Garmins, we are at least provisionally solving the embodiment problem of robotics with our own bodies and becoming the smart robots we crave. If our dashboard navigational system can find an alternative route home in a traffic jam, we’ll have that much more time to watch our dependent loved ones fetch balls.