You're an inventor. Do your thing! Build stuff, explore, save the world.
[quote=nebula1]
... I believe I need to do this to progress.
[/quote]
If by "the container" you mean the robot's trunk, as far as I can tell the only thing you can put in there is the HOPPENFLOBBER. If by "the container" you mean a HOPPENFLOBBER, it will eat yellow plates but will not produce them. It's not stated in the instructions, and I didn't figure it out until disassembling the robot in the army base, but you first have to hammer regular steel plates onto your robot before being able to hammer yellow plates onto it.