The first thing in the decision tree is "do you send a crew?" and you're trading off the hard problem of teleoperating the thing (need a big advanced in autonomy) vs the hard problem of providing a habitat and liklihood that the crew doesn't come home. So yeah, sending bots ahead to build an environment is an option even on Mars. I think Wall-E.
If you're going that far though you might consider not sending intact humans at all and just sending the eggs and growing them out either artificially or in some other animal.
(I see the Ceres thing as being on the line to interstellar colonization whereas I don't see Mars as such. A likely intermediate step past that is doing something similar on an outer solar system or interstellar body, say, Titan or Pluto, powered by D-D fusion.)
I don't want to meet the humans that were raised by robots in the astroid belt instead of growing up in a community of humans. I think we would need to 100x our understanding of childhood development to have a chance of raising healthy adults, much less adults that could reintegrate well into 'natural' human societies.
Tele-operating a whole facility and more is something where you can make huge improvements down here on earth, before you even start into space, and even make a profit from it.
people like to grow stuff, including other humans, in different environments and under different conditions.
how will "that one" oddly specific cell in the the thigh or the amygdala of population segment X evolve under conditions X to the Z?
call it what you wanna call it; it's all part of the infinite game.
zoom in or out, it does not stop.
it's a wonderful life.
robots will play with linguistics, semantics and all those chemicals and natural laws just as much as we do. after a brief period of mental chaos, they will slow down and find peace in the balancing act and re-interpretation. without torture and sabotage.