What’s next for robots? They’re becoming smarter, more personalized, more adaptive. But at the same time they’re becoming more complex and capable, they’re also becoming more basic. One MIT scientist, for instance, is trying to program physical materials to assemble themselves.

The TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., today presented three very different approaches to robotics: A safe industrial robot called Baxter, a cheap personal robot called Romo, and a research initiative into programmable materials such as self-folding proteins.