Gem-gum 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 at human scales. Given a gem-gum-tech technology base has been reached 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 design dynamically and on the spot.
(wiki-TODO: Add the sketch.)
Contents
As manipulator on the top of the assembly level stack
Gem-gum tentacle manipulators may likely become an optional extension at the very highest of the assembly levels of a gem-gum factory.
In fact such a tentacle-manipulator could be made to be dynamically spawned by the underlying assembly levels from its own microcomponents whenever it is needed. And then disassembled back into its microcomponents and stowed away when it's no longer needed. Note that microcomponennt recomposition is can be much faster than mechanosynthesis. Fast means means one might want to go at least slow enough to not make a loud boom through the displacement air.
Internal bearings
Make no mistake in judgement. These tentacle-manipulators seeming, feeling, and behaving as if it where made from rubber does not mean they are made from rubber. It's all gemstone based metamaterial.
For ultra low friction such manipulators could internally use infinitesimal bearing in various configurations. At these big macroscopic levels these stratified shearing bearings may even be organically bent and twisted and end open in a stow-away zone in the metamaterial. Remotely similar to how rigid chains roll up at the end. Much work for future gem.gum-tech nanoengineers to design that.
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. ...
