  Ants use their mandibles - effectively a two-finger gripper - for a wide
range of grasping activities. Here we investigate whether mimicking the
internal hairs found on ant mandibles can improve performance of a two-finger
parallel plate robot gripper. With bin picking applications in mind, the
gripper fingers are long and slim, with interchangeable soft gripping pads that
can be hairy or hairless. A total of 2400 video-documented experiments have
been conducted, comparing hairless to hairy pads with different hair patterns.
Simply by adding hairs, the grasp success rate was increased by at least 29%,
and the number of objects that remain securely gripped during manipulation more
than doubled. This result not only advances the state of the art in grasping
technology, but also provides novel insight into the mechanical role of
mandible hairs in ant biology.
