Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

As for scouting personnel you really need a set team with passionate members. Also, it really helps if the team your scouting has a set person in the pits for scouts to talk to. It's difficult to just stand there and have no one know any of the answers. 973 had a set person there for scouts to ask questions to. Many of the teams I scouted didn't. And don't go saying you need a big team to do this, 973 has 11 people.

For software we use an access database. Also paper scouting sheets.

Anyone know a good small printer btw?

Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

we had six people scouting, one on video, and then our head of scouting (me) doing holistic scouting on all bots, then on highly-ranked and likely-picked bots. the holistic stuff wasn't as useful as i'd hoped, mostly because the statistics gave us all of the info we needed. basically our staff understood that they were getting two days off from school, so they'd better do something useful.
at LVR we saw a team using Playstation controllers... hope to see some info on those devices. The way to do it would be six laptops, but paper works too. It's just a pain to digitize. Next year we will do something a little more high-tech.

Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

In Florida, we used a very confusing, and at times complex paper system which was very tedious and annoying. Surprisingly, our scouts held in there and managed to gather some quality data. Unfortunately, it was quite difficult to analyze on the spot to assist our strategy, so a lot of it was a waste until we returned to the hotel Friday evening.

In Las Vegas, I had little intentions of convincing such a small group to commence with scouting, but some down time on Thursday prompted me to whip up a very quick and simple web-based entry form and later, a very simple "match selector" which would provide a formatted page of some statistics and notes on each team of an alliance. The results were amazing for such a simplistic system, and the scouts were actually enjoying what they were doing. By Saturday, our information on each team was relatively accurate and detailed enough to be used to formulate reliable strategies. Several alliance printouts yielded critical data that was utilized to assist in strategy.

I am spending this week to strengthen the system I developed in Las Vegas to be used in Atlanta. It will hopefully influence our strategy in monumental ways and give us better results in the long run. If it is decent enough, I may offer a distributable package this weekend. Additionally, we were tossing around the idea of a collaborative network of scouting data in Atlanta if any teams were interested in our system. If I get enough requests, I can easily make it happen. I shall release more information as it unfolds.

Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

Something that i've noticed personally is that despite what it says in your scouting database, strategies of teams tend to change often and vary to adjust to whoever they are allied against.

Just something i remembered about the past regional i attended.

Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

If you have varying scouting data on a team for several matches, it is reasonable to conclude that that team is big on dynamic strategy. Their "advantage" can be reversed by catching them ahead of time and switching up your own strategy in an attempt to counteract their reaction. This is the beauty in scouting and strategy in general. Those who can ultimately foresee, shall prevail. Scouting is merely an attempt to document actions on the field and is not quite half the battle. The interpretation of the data and resulting strategy is what really matters.

Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

Our team does have data for a lot of matches per team(in fact all matches each team were in), but because of the random match alliances and the fact many robots don't actually end up being on the same alliance together until lets say for example quarters, sometimes matches end up quite unpredictable.

I do believe what you said is true, but just to clarify what i meant in my previous post since i didn't really write in depth;
What i meant when i said "vary to adjust to whoever they are allied against." is for example; a robot who played only offense throughout practice and qualification matches could randomly choose to play defense.

Of course this is all in good strategy, and not foreseeing this has nothing to do with blaming it on scouting, but all i meant to get through is that many teams are becoming really creative with their strategies this year, and sometimes looking at all your scouting sheets wont be all you need.

Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

I agree with you totally. It will never be all you need, especially this year. Nevertheless it is wise to have a decent scouting system to assist in strategy development. Its only intention is to help reduce the degree of guessing, which will always be existent regardless of how good your data is. Your observation should always be fresh in the minds of scouts, strategists, operators, and coaches as anything is possible. As better scouting systems are developed, better strategies are developed. It is all one big game of cat and mouse.

Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

I think the best thing our team did with our scouting this year was not so much a strategy-based evaluation of each team ("Team X always goes for their left side") as much as a simple statistical route ("Team X seems to score at least one ring per match on the bottom tier.") The app we wrote helped greatly with the analysis portion of the scouting, since it meant not leafing through hundreds of pages of paper notes, and helped us quite a bit as the Chesapeake went on.

And of course, it helped that we had easy stats on scoring to help us on Saturday with the choices for alliance partners. :)

The downsides for us, at least, were a lack of enthusiasm in scouting at times (which seems hardly limited to our experience) and a lack of thorough pit scouting, but I'm confident that the scouting team will work out the bugs for Atlanta. And then it's on to planning for next year!

Re: Reflections on Scouting 07
 

we love your app too, 768. that data allowed us to prepare an awesome scouting report on all 8 alliances, that turned out to be pretty accurate (three qfs that we called all went the way we said). i didn't get to drive, but i agree that it is more important to know what this robot is capable of putting up than what their strategy is: strategy is pretty easy to change, but a robot that puts up 1-2 ringers/match isn't going to be a 6-ringer threat. we can then assume that if the alliance has two 6-ringer/match bots, the 1-2 bot might try to play some defense/bodyguard.
i love statistics!