I was at the Pack Expo show on Wednesday, 10/31/2012 and saw a lot of robots. The use of "parallel-arm" robots (Fanuc calls them "fist" robots) was impressive. There were a lot of them, they were fast and they were accurate. Particularly impressive was a Fanuc model M-1iA demonstrating sorting pills by color at the rate of about 3/second and putting them in three different jars.
Afterward, I found the Fanuc website and there are over 100 videos of different Fanuc robots in operation. These can be found at:
http://www.fanucrobotics.com/home/Videos/
The pill-sorting one is on page 5, second from the bottom (#59?). Enjoy!
To my knowledge, this type of robot arm has not been used in FRC or FTC, but it may have an application in the future using 3 servos and inverted from the one in the video. It would not move a large, massive game piece, but maybe in the future, we can use more powerful servos.
We have about 16 pounds more to add, including the code- all that code can get heavy! - Dave Campbell [more] 
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