stationary robot

[GKrotkov]

We didn't end up building it, but we did consider the possibility of an immobile stacker.

As for immobile strategy, I imagine it would follow something of this pattern:

Three viable positions to place your immobile robot - between the landfill and the far scoring platform, by a human player station, or on/by a scoring platform. The Landfill position would be useful for grabbing bins off the step or clearing the landfill, and would probably require a robot to move the stacks your immobile stacker created onto a scoring platform*. The HP position would be the kind of immobile stacker that loaded totes from the HP and spit out a completed stack, unmoving from the station. This would also require a robot to take the stacks the immobile stacker creates and put them on a scoring platform*. Finally, if you've placed your stacker on or near a scoring platform, then you'd have a feeder robot bring you totes while the immobile stacker makes really high stacks.

I'm not sure how capping a stack would work with this, it might mean using that third robot to purely litter bins and cap stacks. In that case, they need to be able to lift really high with the bin, because the whole advantage of the immobile stacker is the ability to build really high stacks, and you only have so many bins, so a bunch of short stacks can't all be capped.


* This would be tricker than it sounds - the stack mover has to make sure nothing falls over while they're transporting the stack.