The paper describes the research activity jointly carried out by the Universities of Brescia, Bergamo, Ancona and the Institute of Industrial Technologies and Automation of the Italian National Research Council, focusing on the main issues concerning the manipulation and assembly of extremely small components. Beside analyzing theoretical and practical aspects, the project, funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, Universities and Research, aims at the realization of an automated test bed for the assembly of micro pieces whose typical dimension belongs to the submillimeter scale range. The perspective is to contribute to the realization of general automatic production systems at the moment absent for objects of these dimensions.