Aerial manipulators have the unique ability to cover wide-spread areas within a single mission, making them ideal for the transport and placement of sensors required to build an instrumented environment. Recent work in the field has focused on controllers for aerial interaction that account for compliance during contact-based tasks, omitting integration concerns that are critical to an automated solution. Furthermore, state-of-the-art flying base manipulators are often mechanically and computationally complex, reducing their endurance. Within this work, we present an interactive framework for autonomous sensor placement that incorporates both mechanical and software based compliance, optimised for use on a simple coplanar quadrotor. Under appropriate actuation and perception constraints, we detail the development of a control, perception, and motion planning strategy to enable sensor placement that relies solely on onboard computation and sensing, thus presenting a fully contained and accessible sensor placement approach capable of robust interaction with the environment. An extended finite-state machine is developed to facilitate automated mission planning. Extensive flight experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of each sub-system, as well as the integrated solution. Experiments result in trajectory tracking errors under 10 mm as well as onboard mass estimation errors under 0.7% for sensors of various weights. A statistical analysis of 162 flight experiments shows the proposed framework's ability to autonomously place sensors within 10 cm of the target with a success rate of 93.8% and 95% confidence interval of (89%, 97%), thus confirming the robustness of our approach.1.

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Research into remote sensing tools for environmental monitoring is an essential aspect for ensuring a healthy an thriving biosphere under the canopy, but also for preventing forest-related hazards from occurring. The challenges associated with forestry robotics are posed by the environment itself, as forests are widespread areas with a high density of obstacles and complex geometries to navigate in. Multirotors are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that offer great agility and an unbounded operational workspace within a compact size. These features make their deployment in such wide areas most suitable for depositing wireless sensor networks that provide real-time forest monitoring. Hence, within this paper we propose a novel paradigm to environmental monitoring which exploits UAVs as the carriers of environmental sensors to be deployed in forests. Three different methodologies and systems are hereby presented and discussed for sensor placement tasks, leveraging bespoke design, navigation and control techniques. @en