Looking for short cycle times in robotized manipulation means obviously to look for short motion time, as well as stabilization time as short as possible, while guaranteeing the robustness of performances with respect to perturbation and changes in conditions of use. The goal of this project is to search for the ways to multiply pick-and-place speed by 5 to 10: this is a major technological breakthrough enabled on strong scientific innovations in two basic sciences which are among the foundation of robotics, kinematic and dynamic design and automatic control. The first topic to be studied here is the general architecture of the robot, and we propose to consider parallel robots with actuation redundancy, probably together with direct drive actuation. A second topic is vibration minimization (at stop points) and we propose to tackle that with a twofold strategy: as far as design is concerned, we'll look for dynamically balanced architectures, and on the control point of view, we'll study non linear control laws able to take advantage of multiple piezoelectric drives embedded in the robot structure. This project can be understood in two ways, depending if the focus is placed on the « research » aspect or on the « industrial » aspect: tools and methods for designing innovative mechanical architectures and the matching control laws, on one side, or, on the other side, design of two realistic prototypes, with 2 and 4 degrees of freedom, for high performance pick and place; thus the experimental part of this project is quite important. In the writers' eyes those two views are equally important; the whole project is set up in a preindustrial context emphasized by the scientific and technological inputs coming from two private R&D centres (one will come with a strong knowledge in mechatronic; the other will bring applied automatic control; both have a deep understanding of the envisioned markets). This R&D centres are in a perfect synergy with academic research centres specialized in design, robotics and automatic control.