  Granular jamming has been identified as a fundamental mechanism for the
operation of robotic grippers. In this work, we show, that soft particles like
expanded polystyrene beads lead to significantly larger gripping forces in
comparison to rigid particles. In contradiction to naive expectation, the
combination of jamming and elasticity gives rise to very different properties
of the jammed phase, compared to hard-particle systems. This may be of interest
also beyond the application in robotic grippers.
