Robotic fetch-and-carry tasks are commonly facilitated to demonstrate a number of research directions such as navigation, mobile manipulation, systems integration, etc. As a part of an integrated system in terms of a service robot framework, this paper describes a set of methods for real-world object manipulation tasks. We concentrate here on two particular parts of a manipulation sequence: i) robust visual servoing, and ii) grasping strategies. In terms of visual servoing we discuss the handling of singularities during a manipulation sequence. For grasping, we present a biologically motivated strategy using tactile feedback.