Gem-gum fairy-hand-tentacle manipulator
Soft and freely bending tentacle like manipulators capable of local stiffening with some gripping fingers at the tip seem to be a very good solution for general gripping and manipulation tasks. Given a gem-gum-tech technology base that make these very possible.
Such a gem-gum tentacle manipulator can give more usage flexibility and dexterity than hard robot arm like designs with fixed hinges. Also with a good (not easy) design gem-gum tentacle manipulators can easily be made to locally stiffen up and emulate any sort of hinged arm desing dynalically and on the spot.
Safety
As with all potentially powerful robots there are crushing risk safety concerns. when it comes to robots that are meant for intimate collaboration with humans. One way to address this may be by hard-coding maximal capable force limits as low as possible into the structure. Like e.g. using a kind of microcomponents that has a fixed over-force safety ratchet built in. So a malicious attacker would need to replace the microcomonents themselves. And it will likely be possible to put tighter control on such more fundamental actions. ...
