EMERYVILLE, Calif. — During a recent speech at the University of California, Berkeley, Pieter Abbeel played a video clip of a robot doing housework.

In the clip recorded in 2008, the robot swept the floor, dusted the cabinets, and unloaded the dishwasher. At the end of it all, it even opened a beer and handed it to a guy on a couch.

The trick was that an engineer was operating the robot from afar, dictating its every move. But as Mr. Abbeel explained, the video showed that robotic hardware was nimble enough to mimic complex human behavior. It just needed software that could guide the hardware — without the help of that engineer.

“This is largely a computer science problem — an artificial intelligence problem,” Mr. Abbeel said. “We have the hardware that can do the job.”