­Background The advent of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has opened numerous opportunities for executing perilous and mission-critical tasks such as search and rescue, exploration in radioactive and hazardous environments, inspection of vertical structures, and water sample collection. The task of object collection on water surfaces is challenging...

Background Multicopters are being increasingly deployed for various tasks such as pick and place, and contaminant collection. To enable aerial grasping and manipulation, multicopters are equipped with rigid or soft graspers. However, aerial grasping and manipulation is a challenging task as it requires extremely precise real-time position control which...