[Kevin Sevcik]

So I have some advice for you and anyone else thinking about lifting up other robots this year:

Don't do it. Don't even waste any more time thinking about it or how cool it'd be or how many points you'd score. Because even if you design your lift system to be capable of this, it will never, ever happen. No one will be planning or expecting anyone to try this, so no one will have any way of latching onto your robot. So your extra beefy super powered lifter will only ever be lifting up your own robot. Which means you've spent time and pounds on a system that will never give you an advantage.

For those interested exactly how Team 57 has finally reached this conclusion after several years of bashing our heads against it, here's our history of robots on top of our robot:

My team has rarely resisted the lure of having another team drive over or on top of our robot for the purpose of lifting or balancing them. In 2007 we had a pair of wide, quick lifting ramps when lifiting your teammates was explicitly part of the game, and it worked well, though we tragically missed out on two regional wins. (Sorry Karthik.)

In 2010, our robot was a giant ramp so a teammate could drive onto the tower, and/or stay on top of us as we lifted ourselves, which was sort of relevant. It was a horrible idea and the only time it even sort of worked, we caught our teammate's bumper and flipped them off the tower. (Two years later, the pictures of this are pretty funny, actually.)

Just last year, we were finishing laying out things on the robot and said, "Hey, there's all this free space in front of the shooter tower... Let's have someone drive on top of us and balance with them!" We built the robot with nice grippy pads for someone to drive on and everything. It never happened. After seeing how fun balancing was with just the one robot, you'd have to be crazy to want to drive on top of our robot just to try to triple balance.

After last year, I instructed the students to throw something at me if I ever said the words "ramp" and "robot" in the same sentence during design talks this year.