I really like the way your robot looked at Sacramento. Simply one of the more creative looking robot outs there.
From a robot design stand point, I want to ask why you guys didn’t put the motors on each arm together and have it drive 1 telescope up to the bar instead? I noticed that you need both arm on the bar to have enough power to pull up, and having 2 arms create the risk that both might not be on at the same time.
I think I have a quick solution. Simply program the arms to go up at the same time, and joint the end of the arm together so even if only 1 of the grabber reach the bar, you can still pull up.
It’s kind of like drive train with 4 motors, do you join the 2 motors on each side together? Or do you have 1 motor at each wheel. What people found out is, if you have 1 motor at each wheel, when only 1 wheel is touching the ground, you only have the power of 1 motor. If you join the 2 motors together and have a tank drive, each side’s wheels have 2 motor’s power even if only 1 wheel is touching the ground.
And, sorry for being so stupid :p, but although I get almost all of the references (love the paint job on the little green guy) I still don’t get what 6A7 is. It doesn’t seem to be hex for anything…
Well, that’s because it’s not hex :). It’s our team # in base-13, where 9*6 really is 42.
We faced that problem in a couple of matches. Theoretically, the arm and motor should work with only one of the two, but it hasn’t been tested yet. I’ll pass your suggestion along to our arm team and see what they think. Thanks! 
Definately cool. What made you decide to go with the two big wheels?
The original purpose of the 24 inch wheels was to allow us to go up the 6 inch step more easily. In fact, much of our design was tied around this single event. Ironically enough we were unable to actually get up the 6" step until the eliminations. However it did finally serve its purpose and allows us speedily gettying up the step.
It looks to me like the robot is made out of nearly all Lexan… Is this true? Lexan is awesome. Great looking bot.
what caused the change in performance?
Right on the money. Our team has been in love with Lexan ever since we took a hammer to it last year. Every single member swung away at it and we barely even scratched it. This year we covered the entire robot with it (including bases for our electronics, pneumatics, and arm modules). We used mostly 1/8", 1/16" and even 1/32" thick sheets. If there weren’t quite so many wires on our electronics board you could see right through to the pneumatics module and the floor below it from the top.
We altered our skids and the change was enough to let us get up.
The skid you can see in this pic is the new improved one, the old one had a more gradual and rounded slope, this led us to getting beached trying to go up the step. After making this smaller fixed angle skid we were able to get up the step with little trouble.
PS. Both skids were made mostly out of Lexan and the new one even has a sheet oh 1/32" Lexan pulled tightly around it to protect the carpet from it’s metal parts.