If a team were to put tread material on the "low speed" wheels, similar to the design from which this, um, monster (for lack of better word
) came from.
If you did that, it'd enable you (I think) to mount the stair, and then the tread material would pull the robot up as you powered the motors forward. Once you're up, pop back up into high speed, and you're good to go.
Similarly, to get down, you could drive the low speed wheels up to the ledge in low speed (obviously would require a high amount of driver control, or some sort of feedback system), pop "up" into high speed, but since the high speed front wheels are over the air, they fall back down, hit the ground, and you can smoothly transition back down to the lower area (or much more so that just driving off and hoping you land without breaking anything).
The only problem I can see here is, well, Krass's designs do tend to be a bit more complicated to build than they look on paper (a problem for teams with less materials, but well within range of any midsized team who has a decent supply of robot-building parts). But, if you can get it working, it's usually a pretty formidable robot. And not to discourage newer teams (is 810 still considered a newer team?), but this is a design that you may want to hold off a bit on, at least until you're sure of your capabilities, because yes, it will perform, but it will take you a long time to build this.
Otherwise, I'm glad to see that "El Toro" may now have a distant cousin/decendent/etc, and I really hope a team does go with this design this year, because it is quite an amazing looking robot.
Keep up the good work Krass
.