Year by year, service robotics is becoming an attractive field and a cutting-edge research topic, and it has been able to attract the attention of several international research groups. In such a scenario, the European project ARCAS (FP7-ICT- 287617), under which this thesis has been partially developed, intends to propose new solutions about cooperative aerial manipulation. Moreover, many other research projects aim at the design of robotic solutions able to work in the so called ¿human friendly¿ applications, where humans and robots can safely share a common space. This is for example the case of the ERC project RoDyMan, concerning the dynamic manipulation of deformable objects, in which also a contribution has been provided during my PhD program. In other context, like alpine scenarios, the SHERPA project is trying to develop a robotic team composed of ground and aerial robots for searching and rescue missions.