  We demonstrate the use of shortcuts to adiabaticity protocols for
initialisation, readout, and coherent control of dressed states generated by
closed-contour, coherent driving of a single spin. Such dressed states have
recently been shown to exhibit efficient coherence protection, beyond what
their two-level counterparts can offer. Our state transfer protocols yield a
transfer fidelity of ~ 99.4(2) % while accelerating the transfer speed by a
factor of 2.6 compared to the adiabatic approach. We show bi-directionality of
the accelerated state transfer, which we employ for direct dressed state
population readout after coherent manipulation in the dressed state manifold.
Our results enable direct and efficient access to coherence-protected dressed
states of individual spins and thereby offer attractive avenues for
applications in quantum information processing or quantum sensing.
