[jee7s]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

I simply don't see an Autonomous Stack happening except by single robots picking up all three crates--and that's going to be a difficult task only accomplished by the best of the best.

The totes are about 21 feet apart, so you have fifteen seconds to acquire, move ~7', acquire-stack, move ~7', acquire-stack, move ~7' to get in the zone (Auto Zone!), let go, then move a very small amount.

All while avoiding your alliance partners and the Containers.

Possible? Sure.
Probable? Only at the highest levels of competition.

Not to single out Patrick here, but this is indicative of a lot of "thinking before the change." There's an assumption here that you need to move to do each acquire-stack operation. Separately, there's an assumption that you need vision tracking to find the totes. But, I can just as easily picture a situation where a robot touches all of the totes with a mechanism at match start, pulls them toward each other in a known and predictable way, stacks them, and carries them into the Auto Zone and sets them down. Not that my team is planning on building that mechanism, but the stack can be made without moving the robot in (as a guesstimate) 5 seconds. Then drive forward and set it down. 20 points in 8 seconds. Boom done.

I know my team has struggled with the change. It's pretty dramatic, really opens up possibilities, but also takes effort to shift the frame of reference.