Aerial Manipulation

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Overview

Aerial manipulation studies how drones can physically interact with objects and infrastructure, from grasping and payload transport to pushing, placement, and contact inspection. Approaches combine specialized platforms and end effectors—such as tilting or fully actuated rotors, rigid or continuum arms, grippers, and cables—with model-based control, visual or force feedback, and increasingly learned policies. A central challenge is coordinating flight and manipulation despite underactuation, payload changes, rotor downwash, contact forces, and uncertain object dynamics; methods range from predictive and adaptive control to reinforcement learning and vision-language-action systems. Real-robot demonstrations are expanding, but reliable contact, generalization beyond training conditions, and comparable evaluation across embodiments and environments remain open challenges.

Latest papers

CardsList

76 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, down 42% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Dual Path Following for an Aerial Manipulator Under State and Input Constraints via Transverse Feedback Linearization

    Nov 1, 2026Hamza Tariq, Adeel AkhtarFeedback ControlAerial Manipulation

    Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.

  2. CAPTURER: A Dexterous Aerial Manipulator for Dynamic and Precise Grasping across Diverse Environments

    Oct 29, 2026Meng Wang, Jindou Jia, Sicheng Zhou +4Aerial RoboticsRobotic Grasping

    School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang, Singapore +3

  3. Nonlinear Control of Aerial Manipulator

    Oct 25, 2026Sandesh ThapaAerial RoboticsAerial Manipulation

    School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Control, Robotics & Automation Lab (CoRAL), Spring 2017 Oklahoma State University Stillwater, Oklahoma

  4. Adaptive Aerial Loco-Manipulation Policy Learning via LLM-Assisted Proactive Task Generation

    Oct 22, 2026Jingyu Ru, Xiangyuan Xie, Lixuan Jin +8Aerial RoboticsAerial Manipulation

    Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China · National Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China +1

  5. CALM: Decentralized Control of Cooperative Aerial Manipulation with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 13, 2026Jiaxi Huo, Petre Ricioppo, Fausto Francesco LizzioAerial ManipulationDecentralized MARL

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy

  6. Benchmarking Interaction-Oriented Aerial Mobility across Heterogeneous Environments

    Oct 13, 2026Zhibo Duan, Hanlin Kong, Tianran Ma +8UAV NavigationAerial Manipulation

    Zhejiang University · Differential Robotics

  7. An Open MuJoCo Simulation Framework for a Quadrotor Carrying a Tendon-Driven Soft Continuum Arm

    Oct 11, 2026Haitham El-HussienyAerial ManipulationRobotics Simulation

    Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST), Alexandria, Egypt

  8. Shared-Control Teleoperation of Omnidirectional Aerial Robots for Continuous Valve Rotation

    Oct 10, 2026Jinjie Li, Yicheng Chen, Haokun Liu +1Robot TeleoperationAerial Manipulation

    DRAGON Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

  9. Cooperative Aerial Transportation of a Payload with a Sliding Cable Attachment

    Oct 9, 2026Sebastian Tilaguy Lezama, Diego S D'AntonioAerial RoboticsAerial Manipulation

    Distributed Multi-Agent Robotic Systems (∆MARS Lab), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 48309, USA

  10. Fly-by-Code: Embodied Coding Agents for Aerial Manipulation with Active Visual and Physical Feedback

    Oct 8, 2026Jaewoo Lee, Jeongyeon Seo, Sihyun Cho +10Robotic Program SynthesisError Feedback

    Seoul National University · Carnegie Mellon University · University of Maryland, College Park +2

  11. HexaGripper: A Single-Actuator, Winch-Deployed Gripper for Autonomous Aerial Parcel Collection

    Oct 5, 2026Nimantha Adikaram, Mahen Abeyratne, Lakmina Chandrajith +3Robotic GraspingRobotic Gripper Design

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa 10400, Sri Lanka. · School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia. · School of Science, Engineering and Digital Technologies, University of Southern Queensland, Australia.

  12. AFD-CAMLs: Agile Force-Distribution-Aware Planning and Control for Cable-Suspended Aerial Multi-Lifting Systems

    Oct 1, 2026Antreas Kourris, Sihao SunMulti-Robot Motion PlanningAerial Robotics

    Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology

  13. Passive Stiffness Shaping in Cable-Suspended Aerial Manipulation via Movable Compliant Anchors

    Sep 30, 2026Antonio Franchi, Amr AfifiRobotic ControlAerial Manipulation

    Robotics and Mechatronics Lab, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics & Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands · Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy · Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

  14. Whole-Body Aerial Grasping and Lifting via Partial Visual Observations

    Sep 30, 2026Jiaye Jin, Rui Jin, Xinhang Xu +6Aerial RoboticsPartially Observable RL

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 · College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shanghai Institute of Intelligent Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China · NTU–VinUni Joint Research Laboratory for Embodied AI and Robotics, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, and VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam

  15. From Local Whole-Body VLA Behaviors to Scene-Scale Aerial Manipulation

    Sep 30, 2026Weixiang Guo, Rui Jin, Haotian Jin +7Robotic ControlLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 · College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shanghai Institute of Intelligent Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China · School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China +1

  16. Residual Wrench Certification and Margin-Aware Control Synthesis for Aerial Physical Interaction

    Sep 30, 2026Abhimanyu Khadga, Abhinav Sinha, Shashi Ranjan KumarRobot Morphology-Control Co-DesignRobust Control

    Guidance, Autonomy, Learning, and Control for Intelligent Systems (GALACxIS) Lab, Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA · Intelligent Systems and Control (ISaC) Lab, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, India

  17. Drone Soccer: Learning to Manipulate with Multicopter Downwash

    Sep 29, 2026Neelay Joglekar, Bavin Saravanan, Yutong Wang +3Aerial Manipulation

    The Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA · Department of Aerospace Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

  18. AeroManip-VLA: Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning for Aerial Manipulation with RL-Generated Demonstrations

    Sep 29, 2026Rui Huang, Yanlin Mu, Lidong Li +3Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsVision-Language-Action Models

    National University of Singapore · Beijing Institute of Technology

  19. QuadHand: A Compact Quadrotor Aerial Manipulator with MRC-SDF-Based Whole-Body Motion Planning

    Sep 28, 2026Rui Jin, Ruiyang Liu, Xinhang Xu +4Signed Distance FunctionsWhole-Body Robotic Manipulation

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798

  20. Aerial GRIPPER: A Gradient-based Real-time Inverse-game Predictor and Planner

    Sep 28, 2026Zeshuai Chen, Meng Wang, Jindou Jia +2Robotic GraspingAerial Manipulation

    School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, 100191, Beijing, China · School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore

  21. Aerial Manipulation in the Wild with Onboard Perception, Policy Learning, and Whole-Body Control

    Sep 24, 2026Yuanzhu Zhan, Yufei Jiang, Zemu Zhang +1Aerial ManipulationWhole-Body Robotic Manipulation

    Department of Aerospace Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

  22. Temporal Learning for End-Effector Position Estimation under Aerodynamic Disturbances in Aerial Continuum Manipulation

    Sep 23, 2026Niloufar Amiri, Houman Masnavi, Farrokh Janabi-SharifiRobot State EstimationAerial Manipulation

    Department of Mechanical, Industrial, and Mechatronics Engineering, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada

  23. Vision-Based Control of a Tether-Suspended Aerial Radiation Sensing Payload

    Sep 23, 2026Ian Snider, Brian J. Quiter, Emil Rofors +1Vision-Based Robot ControlAerial Manipulation

    Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA · Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

  24. AeRSoM: An Aerial Rigid-Soft Integrated Manipulator for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Sep 22, 2026Jiacheng Liang, Hang Zhong, Yaonan Wang +5Aerial ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China and also with the National Engineering Research Center for Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Changsha 410082, China · School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

  25. A Deployable Four-Finger Payload for Teleoperated Free-Flying Manipulation with Astrobee

    Sep 22, 2026William Su, Jordan Kam, Yunosuke Nakamura +3Space RoboticsRobot Teleoperation

    Aerospace Engineering Program, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA · Department of Aerospace Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA +1

  26. A Switched Adaptive Control Framework for Aerial Manipulators Under Dynamic Transitions

    Sep 21, 2026Rishabh Dev Yadav, Saksham Gupta, Amitabh Sharma +4Aerial RoboticsAdaptive Control

    Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, UK · Robotics Research Center, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, India · School of Mathematics, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

  27. A Morphing Aerial Robot With Thruster-Integrated Flexible Continuum Links for Shape Adaptive Aerial Manipulation

    Sep 16, 2026Eri Sawada, Kazuki Sugihara, Ayano Miyamichi +2Aerial RoboticsSoft Robotics

    Department of Mechano-Infomatics, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

  28. Prior Evolution and Task Alignment for Aerial Grasping

    Sep 16, 2026Weiliang Deng, Zhengyang Dang, Yao Mu +1Aerial RoboticsTrajectory Optimization

    School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China · AI Institute, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · Differential Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., Hangzhou, China

  29. DuctAM: A Duct-Assisted Quadrotor-Based Aerial Manipulator Enabling High-Force Push-and-Pull Interactions

    Sep 14, 2026Yi Wang, Rui Jin, Xinhang Xu +4Aerial RoboticsQuadrotor Control

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 · NTU–VinUni Joint Research Laboratory for Embodied AI and Robotics, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, and VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam

  30. Contact-Aware Incremental Model Predictive Control for an Underactuated Aerial Manipulator

    Sep 10, 2026Darwin Liu, Tamas Keviczky, Sihao SunNonlinear MPCForce-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

    Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology