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In this study, protein-coated giant phospholipid vesicles were used to model cell plasma membranes coated by surface protein layers that increase membrane stiffness under mechanical or osmotic stress. These changed mechanical properties like bending stiffness, membrane area compressibility modulus, and effective Young's modulus were determined by micropipet aspiration, while bending stiffness, effective Young's modulus, and effective spring constant of vesicles were analyzed by AFM. The experimental setups, the applied models, and the results using both methods were compared here. As demonstrated before, we found that bare vesicles were best probed by micropipet aspiration due to its high sensitivity. The mechanical properties of vesicles with protein surface layers were, however, better determined by AFM because it enables very local deformations of the membrane with barely any structural damage to the protein layer. Mechanical properties of different species of coating proteins, here streptavidin and avidin, could be clearly distinguished using this technique.

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The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2017 has defined ambitious new benchmarks to advance the state‐of‐the‐art in autonomous operation of ground‐based and flying robots. This study covers our approaches to solve the two challenges that involved micro aerial vehicles (MAV). Challenge 1 required reliable target perception, fast trajectory planning, and stable control of an MAV to land on a moving vehicle. Challenge 3 demanded a team of MAVs to perform a search and transportation task, coined “Treasure Hunt,” which required mission planning and multirobot coordination as well as adaptive control to account for the additional object weight. We describe our base MAV setup and the challenge‐specific extensions, cover the camera‐based perception, explain control and trajectory‐planning in detail, and elaborate on mission planning and team coordination. We evaluated our systems in simulation as well as with real‐robot experiments during the competition in Abu Dhabi. With our system, we—as part of the larger team NimbRo—won the MBZIRC Grand Challenge and achieved a third place in both subchallenges involving flying robots.