Realistically facing the challanges of elevating your robot

[Sixis]

Thanks for all the helpful information, I can see why so many people say why this site is invaluable. The idea of grabbing onto one of the vertical poles definitely seems much more plausible than extending a device all the way to the top of the towers. i'll just quickly add my idea which hopefully will help someone else too.

If a robot had an extended piston attached to a vertical post with a gripper of some sort, all the robot would have to do is clamp the gripper onto the pole and retract the arm lifting the robot off the floor so that it hangs on its side. In text characters it would look something like this:

l>

where the "l" is the vertical arm with a gripper on top, joined to the robot with a pivot at the base. the top of the ">" is the extended piston which when retracted would raise the robot off the floor. The angles/piston length and such would have to be tweaked but this seems like it could work.