[DampRobot]

My bet: more often than not, robots will not be able to climb the tower. Those that can will easily take 30 seconds. The best teams in the world will get under ten. I seriously doubt that anyone will even approach 5, even if you don't count alignment time.

Remember, the hard part of deploying minibots in 2011 wasn't getting them up fast enough. It was getting them deployed quickly. A fast (and reliable) deployment was far more important that a fast climb.

Here's some more food for thought: the first seeded teams would much rather pick a slower team to climb that could always do it (low standard of deviation in score), than a robot that climbed slightly quicker, but couldn't do it sometimes (high standard deviation). Don't worry so much about speed, make a robust and easy to align lift.