  In recent years, high-speed navigation and environment interaction in the
context of aerial robotics has become a field of interest for several academic
and industrial research studies. In particular, Search and Intercept (SaI)
applications for aerial robots pose a compelling research area due to their
potential usability in several environments. Nevertheless, SaI tasks involve a
challenging development regarding sensory weight, on-board computation
resources, actuation design and algorithms for perception and control, among
others. In this work, a fully-autonomous aerial robot for high-speed object
grasping has been proposed. As an additional sub-task, our system is able to
autonomously pierce balloons located in poles close to the surface. Our first
contribution is the design of the aerial robot at an actuation and sensory
level consisting of a novel gripper design with additional sensors enabling the
robot to grasp objects at high speeds. The second contribution is a complete
software framework consisting of perception, state estimation, motion planning,
motion control and mission control in order to rapid- and robustly perform the
autonomous grasping mission. Our approach has been validated in a challenging
international competition and has shown outstanding results, being able to
autonomously search, follow and grasp a moving object at 6 m/s in an outdoor
environment
