Nessie uses mecanum drive, a 4 independent motor/transmission/encoder setup. The arm is a balanced 3-bar design driven by dual window motors geared down 9:1. The wrist is pushed out by a pneumatic piston and pulled back by surgical tubing. The gripper uses rollers to pull in and push out the game pieces (worked great). We had 2 minibots, a 4 sec and a 1.7 sec version. The minibots were deployed by a tray supported by heavy duty drawer slides pushed out with a pneumatic piston. Nessie's brain use C++ code organized into multiple simple programs that sent messages to one another. We had custom dashboard done in LabView.
In San Antonio, 1296 finished high in the qualifying rounds and lost in the quarter-finals. In Dallas, 1296 finished qualifying rounds a close second to Team 148 (our vote for world #1 seed) and lost in the semi-finals (due to an intermittent minibot motor wire - arghhh).
http://flic.kr/p/9xnR29
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvtCconGezU
With computers, every once in a while you see something that makes you think "I could have done this, why didn't I think of it? It would have made my life so much easier." Now is one of those times. - Nadav Zingerman [more] 
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