Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Does anyone else think so? I mean, with the old system of "one scout per team", it would be nearly impossible, I think-scouts will definitely need to keep an eagle eye on each human player, as I can imagine that their "batting average" will be a big factor in alliance selection; but at the same time, robots must be tracked for evasive manuevers, cell delivering (and those similarly-colored empty cells will be hard to track!), pinning, actual scoring, and any other strategies teams may think of. Plus, as soon as the game is over, scouts will have to count that 3D stack of balls as quickly as possible before field reset people start emptying it out... I'm almost glad now that I'm not my old team's scouting manager now! :yikes:

Or are there any ways that it could be made easier? Perhaps one person could watch several human players, but that starts to become a whole lot of scouts... any other ideas?

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I really was just thinking this.

I plan to have freshmen slaves again. Oh and sophomores.

Ask teams what they did in 02 and in 06 and I'm sure you will find something useful.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

One scout per team is more than enough to scout every team in every match.

So long as they share their data. Each team can make their own conclusions on what the data mean....

Jason

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Send them around witha a laptop to make quick notes. That way they will be able to cover more teams quicker. It will be more difficult at the bigger competitions then the smaller ones due to more teams

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

the hardest thing for a scout will be to keep track of team numbers. it seems like every year when i do scouting the hardest thing was after every match u have to input the raw data in two the computer and no matter how hard u tried the person inputting the raw data could never keep up.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I don't think scouting will be all too important..
Since the human players are a very large part of scoring, obviously the teams with bigger, strogner kids like myself will be better

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

A bigger stronger kid with no hand eye coordination won't do you much good.

but Obviously through your logic, I guess your team could dominate mine then, correct? Or if I have a giant on my team I guess you wouldn't stand a chance....

Keep those types of opinions to yourself please. This game has to do with skill, being bigger is not a skill. A kid half your size could shoot better than you and win over you.

edit: btw i highly doubt you need to be strong to throw an orbit ball...

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Get some of the baseball, softball, and basketball players to join the team. To play those sports you need to have good aim

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

You're going to have to have pretty good aim to get an orbit ball in a randomly-moving, relatively fast, not very large target with no backboard. I don't think human players will be doing the majority of scoring this year.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Scouting is always important. Matter of fact, it is the difference between a winning team and everyone else.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I believe that scouting this year will be especially difficult because of the number of tasks and/or objectives that can be judged. Not only do scouts have to pay attention to the robots themselves, but also the payload specialists. Are the payload specialists shooting percentage high? Are they throwing the moon rocks wisely? Are they using the empty cells in a way that is beneficial to the team? These are all questions that people have to ask themselves when thinking about who they want to be in their alliance (and those questions are just for a single aspect of the game).

Since there are so many variables to this game, I believe that a different approach to scouting will be necessary for teams that don't have the people/resources to track every single statistic.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Any team that thinks scouting is not important will be in for a RUDE awakening when competition rolls around.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I agree. For every second of the match, there will be a relatively constant possibility of one of your alliance's payload specialists scoring one moon rock on an opposing robot's trailer due to the fact that each robot on the field will always been in range of an opposing payload specialist.

However, it is much more likely for a robot to score many points quickly, as they can get very close to the trailer and feed/dump/shoot several moon rocks much faster than the payload specialist can. IMO

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Sorry, I always forget you can't say something in a sarcastic voice on computer. I was poking at the fact of that the teams with sports players will have advantage I was just being facetious

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Teams that do scout know the importance of what those people do. I believe that the team that don't scout for what ever the reason is are missing out in the fun and the amount of resources gained from scouting no matter how time or energy consuming they may be.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

There will be a lot happening on the field. It's up to the scouting team/drivers/coach to determine what is important. In the past we've kept data on nearly everything quantitative. This year, I think pit scouting is worth very little. It all comes down to how robots can maneuver on slippery regolith and how accurate their Human Players are. I'd highly recommend at least 1 scout per robot, you may need two to keep track of both the HP and the robot. Also, your scouts will get tired, so try and rotate so that they get more interesting teams to watch, and the occasional break.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I think you really hit the nail right on the head here. Human Player and driver performance are going to be, in my opinion, the two most important factors in this game, and you can't really find anything about either in the pits (maybe you can set up a target and invite teams to throw balls into it? Set up a FIRST combine :yikes: ) Also, like you said, there will be essentially 12 things to keep track of-each human player and each robot. Some teams will need a lot more disposable freshmen... :eek:

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Maybe because we already use Wifi for programming, there should be some push to, at each regional, get a "server" running on a public WiFi where people can post up the data they recorded (as well as access this data)?

Just an idea.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

If you honestly think the human player will do alot of scoring you should really take another look at this game... try and simulate it with people as robots and garbage cans as goals, and use dodge balls as the moon rocks, you will learn quickly how hard it will be for the human player to score on these moving robots. Also take a look back at 02, the human player situation was very similar.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

hopfuely youre not the on that does teh writing in teh zcouting book

we've never really scouted before but thats cause my team was never top 8 in the regional but this year it seems like anything is possible, but the original post brings up valid points about the factors of this years game which will make it a very interesting competition (like always, lol)

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Our results were not this conclusive. Our setup used trash cans with caster wheels underneath as the trailers and students as the robots. The rocks were represented by a combination of soccer balls, volleyballs, dodgeballs and basketballs. We did not have any Alliance Station or Outpost walls, but the Outpost players were required to stay in their chairs. With the number of balls we had, we allowed balls that rolled back to any of the human players to be thrown in again. This means we were probably throwing a bit more than 20 balls per match, but I would guess not more than about 30 at the most.

Our human players were getting about 2 to 4 scores per player per match with only 2 "robots" on the field per alliance. The most I scored in one match from the corner was 6 and the most one of our Outpost players scored was 8.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

It's going to be harder because only do they have to be concerned with the robot and the drivers but they have to be xoncrrned with the human throwers as well. It is a lot more to keep track of and more people to interview it is going to be very hard or one scout

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I have to agree and say that pit scouting will not be as important as match scouting because there will be little use of arms and such. Not none, just little.

The questions to ask for pit scouting will obviously be if the robot can score on it's own. Also, can it store Rocks? Looking at the drive system, in my opinion, will not be too useful because you will not know how it drives on the field nor will you know how well the drivers are. I guess another thing to ask is if the team is tracking the goals or of it's all on the drivers. And autonomous, that's another obvious one, although it can be seen during a match.

For match scouting, I suggest having one scout per robot but then also having 2 additional scouts that will keep track of the human players, one for each alliance. I believe human players will play an important role this year. If anyone can check old scouting methods for '02 and '04 that would be helpful. I guess the main things to look at for a robot is maneuverability, trailer containment, and scoring on the go.

My 2 cents.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Also keep in mind that there will be pinning. I human player can toss more balls into a stopped robot than the robot can do itself. I think that the two will be equal scoring.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

This is still the same point if you think about it.

By no means does any kid in FIRST have an advantage over anyone else because of athletic ability.

You want your team to go and do well? Go practice.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

A couple comments I have (covering some of the various topics in this thread). In terms of scouting personnel, I plan on working with (an)other team(s) (1747 and 1646 if they agree to) so that I can have 1 person looking at each robot and one person looking at each human player. Otherwise, I'll probably say just jot a comment on how the human player did.

As for human players scoring, since the robots will be driving on a slippery material, changing directions may be somewhat difficult. In the experiments that were done, were the robots making any attempts to dodge, and was it carried out on a low friction surface where acceleration (including change of direction) is limited? We put four rover wheels on one of our older robots, and it was rather difficult to turn from a stop (without the trailer). With the trailer, it currently won't move at all, but that's primarily because we don't have the right wheels, and the wheels on it are too tight and will not rotate (they're omni wheels and it's stuck between two rollers).

One issue in keeping track of the robot is to know how many moon rocks etc it has in its possession at any given time. This is because I'm sure that some robots will just mass a large number and dump them all at the same time. While it will be difficult to count preloaded balls, those who use this strategy will likely load the maximum of 7.

On a related yet unrelated note, I intend on using an access database again this year so I don't have to file information on say 63 teams (the number of teams in our first regional), although that may happen anyways. In all likelihood, I'll probably end up entering some robot data directly into the database while watching the match since I get my forms in bursts of about 5 matches.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

The challenge is what makes it fun :D

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I think it will be challenging but not too much more than previous years where human players had the ability to score. For us we usually have 6 students scouting each match and we rotate out the students throughout the day. Helps from keeping people from burning out.
Also to cut out the time of taking the data and analyzing it we just log it into laptops and have a centralized database that collects all the data. Which I plan on putting up on CD again this year.
I guess if the human players became a big enough factor we could add a extra scout for just human players. Also keep the amount of data reasonable. We only focus on the facts. Try to avoid data that could be considered subjective. So we would collect how many moon rocks did they score or did they grab a empty cell instead of are they fast yes or no. Just some thoughts. :-)

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

am I the only person who thinks that regardless of previous matches your human thrower will play an enormous part in how well you do. This is our second year so I was never in any other games that involved humans but when you think about it... You have three very close very slow targets and three (hopefully) fantastic shooters. Plus the orbit balls are really easy to throw. i have a feeling that this year will be different even though I can't speak from any experience.

Oh and not to mention that even the best robots will crash and burn if their driver doesn't know how to deal with the slippery surface

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

During a break I jotted down any item that I could reasonably want to keep track of, and I came up with too many things to keep track of simultaneously (e.g. not only how much does the robot score, but how much is it scored on?). The freshmen... mean volunteers aren't going to like this.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

What did you write down?

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Here are a few for the robot: Moon rocks scored by robot, empty cells transferred, moon rocks scored on robot, penalties, various comments, approximate hit percent (not happening, and even then not going to be a big factor), score differential (this is more likely to be calculated by total team score), super cells scored on/by robot (probably too hard to spot at distance).

For the human player:
#In during autonomous, #miss during autonomous, #In during Tele, #miss during tele, Fueling station/outpost, Hit percent (this will be calculated by access from previous data), Penalties (Hopefully this will always be 0), comment, super cells thrown out of # available (this is going to be HARD).

Since there will probably be robots that just dump moon rocks in, it may be very difficult to count how many go in. Also, teams may vary the number of moon rocks that are preloaded, although I predict that most will go with 7 unless that cannot hold that many. At this point I'm trying to focus on quantitative data, and there's plenty to keep track of that could be useful but will likely be inaccurate.

I chose to split autonomous mode and teleoperated mode for the human player because the robots start in front of an opposing player so there is at least a brief window where the robot should be a relatively easy target with the low acceleration that is possible on the field. Also, during autonomous mode, the robots cannot actively avoid moon rocks, although they will likely move in a path that is not meant to be easy to hit (if the robot is not tracking on to a vision target).

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

that is a good idea. That will help keep organized also last year my team made a really simple robot. The judges really liked it. Maybe this year simpler is better. it si something to keep an eye out during scouting.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Team 1676 has done this for the past 2 years at every regional we attend. So if you go to the NJ or Palmetto Regional this year you will have access to our scouting data if you have a laptop. :D

Since we use our school laptops to scout (instead of the traditional paper and pencil) the database is always up-to-date.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I think scouting will be difficult, but manageable.

A suggestion is to begin by taking pictures of all the robots on Thursday, and filing them ahead of time so you can remember a robot when you look at its file. Then, perhaps use a system with 6 scouters, 1 per team on the field. Have them keep track of key elements:

- how they pick up
- how they score
- which pieces they score
- how accurately they score them
- how many they score
- their driving ability
- their defensive capabilities
- any penalties they incurred
- their weaknesses
- how easily they can be scored on
- where their PS is positioned
- what their PS does during the match
- what they do in autonomous
- if/how they interact with other robots
- do they get stuck in robot pile-ups?
- do they break down easily?
- etc, I'm sure there are other useful things that I forgot to add

While this sounds like a long list, it's actually relatively easy to get all this data. Before the match starts, check on PS positioning, and then just watch the robot and write for the duration of the match. Perhaps something like:

"PS in home fueling station, auton. drives straight to other side of field, gets moonrocks from PS, shoots into other robots, ~50% accuracy, scored about 8 moonrocks on other alliance, lost control of robot and tipped about 1:20 into match- very vulnerable when hit sideways"

You can scrawl something like that out over the course of the match, and since you'll have data like this for every match, you can get a pretty clear picture of how the robot performs, and its trends for the day, rather than looking at one isolated match (the last one it played on Saturday, because you remember it as you're scrambling to come up with picks for elims), or raw numbers (their match scores were 30-50, etc.)

If you keep track of this by computer and use google docs or the like, you can combine this into one spreadsheet, or if you do it on paper, you can organize it numerically by team, and each scouter can put their pages in the scouting binder in the proper location. You'll have a wealth of useful data by the time you need to start thinking about alliances.


Edit: Oops I forgot the other thing I wanted to say. You can join up with other teams and share scouting data, creating databases to share, or you can have your scouters work together if you don't have 6 people to spare. (: Lots of teams do this, and it works out great!

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I'd highly recommend some sort of quantitative system (i.e. keeping track of balls scored by Team XXXX) vs. a qualitative system (i.e. Team XXXX scored a bunch of balls). That way you always have an objective observer, and people's personal bench marks for "good", "bad", "awesome" don't interfere with your data. Not to mention, it makes it way easier to plan match strategy, both in terms of your opposition and your partners.

Everyone overstates the capabilities of their robot. We don't do it intentionally, there's just a lot of pride and worked wrapped up in these magnificent machines. So, it's really helpful to your alliance when you know that team XXXX has actually been averaging Y orbit balls, instead of the Z they told you. Also, it's really cool to see how you stack up on Friday night.

That said, handwritten notes really round out your data. Not everything is obvious in the averages. These handwritten notes can push you to examine spectacular teams you may have missed otherwise.

Also cell phones. I live in the dark ages, and have yet to purchase one. But on Friday/Saturday, they are a total lifesaver. I can't carry around all of our scouting data in my backpack. But the scouting team in the stands can look anything up while we wait for our match to start. It's really, really nice.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

For the years I did scouting for my team, I made sure to focus mostly on numbers and data for the one-team sheets, although I did have a "rank-out-of-5" section. Last year, though, I printed out a sheet (double-sided) with every team name and number next to it, so I could keep it on a clipboard and write little comments myself. We weren't anywhere close to picking, of course, but it would have helped, especially considering that I forgot alliance selection was during lunch, not after :eek:

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

My opinion on the human player is that as long as a team has somebody who can aim AND predict the next move of the drive teams, they will do fine and will score a good amount of points. A basketball player in particular would be almost perfect as a human player. If you think about it, in a basketball game, they have to have good aim to get it to their team mates and also predict what the other team is gonna do to attempt to block them. Baseball and softball players might work, but not necessarily.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I always avoid scouting anyway.

I'm the only one on the team who can film properly without the camera flying all over the place.

Grade 9's are useful in the scouting department.

But I'd say scouting will probably be like every other year and just concentrate on the robot. If you happen to notice that their human player is good, more power to you.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Yeah they're useful... until they throw their clipboards on the ground and leave to go to the CNN center early (this happened last year). I started last year and somewhat ran scouting from a back seat. After about the first day at the Championship I just gave up since there was no way that we would be picking and highly unlikely that we would be picked (e.g. if I was picking, I would not have picked my team because of my data). I'll be looking at human player separately, but if it doesn't seem worth it after (or even during) Buckeye I'll scrap the HP scouting completely in favor of notes on good HPs.

Also, random fact: After divisions for the Championship were announced last year, I told myself, "If 1114, 217, and 148 get on an alliance, they're probably going to win. Not like that's going to happen, since one of them will get picked before they can form that alliance."

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

throwing an orbit ball is a lot harder than throwing a basketball or baseball, they would need a lot of practice, something we are all scrambling to get rightnow as far as the human player in the game

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

You only need three items from that list. Separate design elements from success elements. Accuracy is important, but not for success. Of the ones important to keep track of, only these need to be watched out for during the game:

• Game pieces scored (Sheer numbers - score contributed - is all that matters economically)
• Game pieces in trailer (Might be useful)
• Shortest time from capture to score (If you need to score super cells)
• Activity in autonomous mode (The robot isn't a sitting duck, or, the robot is efficiently designed)

The first two you can get from counting alone, the third takes a bit of studying and you may want one person dedicated to this. The second one, game pieces in trailer, may not even be necessary, and the fourth one, autonomous mode, could be inferred from either the score at autonomous or the second point. Usually I have been able to scout with just two people, this year may require three for me though. Penalties are also important, though you can figure those out after the match (maybe).

Too often people think that there is something significant in what kind of drive system the robot has, say, when it just doesn't matter. There are several different areas a team can be strong in, and when picking alliances you want to be well rounded in all. Things like has a camera simply doesn't affect any of them (by itself). In the last few seasons there have been two distinct statistical areas, teleop and autonomous (and each of those typically can be broken down into about two subareas), and I am predicting this season there will be only one major one, and a minor human player element which will have a deviation too large to be significant. Those two areas (or this year, maybe, one) are all scouters need to be concerned with.

I come to these conclusions by an economic analysts. Start with the theory that resources are limited, and consider the arena a system that contains economic goods, game pieces, goals, and time. The idea is to identify all the resources used to score points and determine how their cost changes with different robots.

This season, we have a few economic goods on the field: The corners, each of the game pieces, trailer space. Cameras, number of wheels, shooter type, ect, has no bearing on how these resources are utilized (well, it does affect how, but you cannot calculate how, and it isn't what is important in making a decision anyways). What does matter is numbers: the cost (resources used, including time) per point. When doing scouting, look for total score contributed by each team, and what other teams have to give up to score. This year, there is not very many things one team has to give up to allow another to score a point, with the exception of super cells for empty cells and moon rocks, since they have a different point value. Autonomous and teleoperated game pieces are scored equally, so there is no time preference on them with respect to the score. If there was, like last year, robots that can do laps vs. score over the overpass would be a consideration. In short, there are very few parameters to be concerned with when selecting alliances, the only major one being how many game pieces can you score (what is the price in time), the other insignificant ones, retrieving empty cells (what is the price per empty cell exchanged), and how well can the human player shoot (what is the price in attempted game pieces, I wouldn't even consider this significant enough to record). All you need to know during scouting is data related to these, which is (as is usual) very easy.

You may be surprised you don't need as much data as you think you do.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Scouting will take more more resources, and more "training" this year.

Last year, you could rather easily count the # of balls a team scored, and that would be a decent representation of that team's offensive ability. Granted you can still do that this year, it would be 1) more difficult to count, and 2) (IMO) a less accurate representation of the team as a whole. I would think that it would be useful to somehow judge how easy teams get scored on. Ex, if a robot scores 20 balls/match, but always manages to get its own trailer filled, then maybe a robot that scores 15/match but manages to only pick up 1 or 2 balls/match would be a more helpful partner.

Another thing that can play a more significant role this year is Human Player ability. That might be even harder to notice.

Most importantly, however, is that the scouts need to know what they're looking for, and as long as you have a few people getting good, useful data, then I think scouting won't be an issue.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Of course. Last year the teams that were picked (in the competitions I went to) scored rather consistently every time with some anomalies (e.g. 71's arm being broken in the middle of a match), and thus by even getting one match for each team it could be possible to get an idea of who was good and who wasn't. However, this year, the scoring is highly dependent on your opponents since they are your targets (well actually, the trailers behind them, but they control the motion of said trailers).

Of course, raw score is not as important as what I call "score differential." As you mentioned, it is important that you score more than you are scored on. In fact, I'll probably even ignore scored supercells and focus on the total number of balls that are scored. This year, data will be less important and for the most part, I'll let the human element always override the data, with the data providing a very rough idea. With all of the variables (i.e. scoring on your opponents), it will become more important to judge by watching rather than by running averages.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I think design elements can play into how successful a robot and/or an alliance is. For example, if an alliance is comprised of three robots which can only collect balls from a payload specialist, won't this have an impact on the dynamics of that alliance? They will frequent certain areas of the field more often, perhaps stopping in front of them often for short periods of time. Similarly, wouldn't you want to know if this was true of an opposing team an/or alliance? Knowing things about design elements can help you to strategize for your alliance, as well as to try to predict what an opposing alliance will do.

Also, how do you figure that accuracy is not important for success? If a particular team only scores about 5% of the game pieces they attempt to score... isn't that a way of measuring how successful they are at their offensive maneuvers? Would you choose a team like this to play offense on your alliance? Would this data affect the way you strategize against an opposing alliance?

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

It does happen to affect how well the robot performs, yes, but knowledge of it it isn't necessary to select the best robot, since accuracy isn't an economic good in this game. If a robot can only score 5% of the time, I wouldn't choose them not because of the 5% number, I wouldn't choose them because they simply fail to score enough points period. Likewise if they break down continuously, this will affect the total number of game pieces scored and affect the choice accordingly. Accuracy is not a limited good, neither is robustness, but time and game pieces are, and thus you need only be concerned with how efficiently the robot uses them if you are selecting alliance partners (selection of partners is all I was concerned with).

You are right, I did almost completely neglect the strategy element (I only really study the qualification numbers, I should put up a disclaimer, actual implementation will vary by needs). For instance, knowing a robot has Ackerman steering is an exploitable weakness that can reduce its overall effectiveness during a game. Knowing the different autonomous modes it has can help too. I have found it difficult to come up with objective data that would be useful, and have tended to ignore those points altogether and leave strategy to someone else in the pits. In any case I'll be sure to keep a better eye on strategy this season :)

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Yeah, I don't know if only going by qualification rankings is really the best way to determine the best robot... actually no, I know that it isn't. The fact that you haven't been running strategy this way and have left it to someone else is good, but you seeing the light on the importance of strategy is even better. :D

Ok, I can definitely see your argument here. I would figure that accuracy and performance are generally related, but I think we're basically arguing the same thing; ultimately, robots that score lots of points are good.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

It actually isn't as hard as you think it is. Once we got our orbit ball, a few of us went out into the hallway at our workshop and threw it to each other while we kept on moving to kinda mock a moving robot.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I think many of the more successful teams elevate the importance of the scouting team and the scouting data.

Good knowledge of your partners and your opposing alliance can make a huge difference in a match. In many ways, the more experienced team members are better at getting this data than the new members (aka "the freshmen"), and can use the scouting time to learn and teach newer members about the different designs and strategies on the field.

Painful, yes.
Sometimes boring, yes.

But, Incredibly important, yes.

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

I don't know about that this year. Depending on what your data fields are, there will probably be a good degree of inaccuracy. If a robot scores balls in autonomous, how many did it score? Were 7 loaded, or only 6 (are you feeling lucky?). Of course, scouting is not all about data but also about the team's opinion on how well another team competes. Most likely I'll have simple data collection done by newer members but analysis and observation (in terms of just taking notes) done by more experienced members.

Also, the data that we collected at Boilermaker last year pretty much wasn't used to determine our picks (although this could partially be because it wasn't compiled well).

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

Agreed. When I ask myself "Who has the best scouts in the world?" and "Who is the best team in the world?" it is the same answer.

-John

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

we did the same thing and got even better results using a fabricated trailer, however when we bought real orbit balls and tried again, we found that 1 human player will be lucky to get 3-5 balls in using static robots that where relatively close to te human players

ps, did you remember the hight of the wall, when we where doing ok until we added that, then out accuracy dropped drastically :ahh:

Re: Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!
 

One scout per team is fine... for really small teams, which isn't as abundant as one may think. The scout team should be anyone not working in the pits, on the field, or miscellaneous work that cannot be left for later (such as getting that one, specific wrench out of the truck in the parking lot). Let's face it, there are always those seniors that don't work in the mechanical field, such as chairmans or animators, etc, and all they do is sit in the audience and cheer. Give 'em a scout sheet and have them keep an eye on a team and it's human/robot players.

This way, when/if you get into the top 8 and need to pick alliance partners, you have more teams to look at than that one, single freshman recorded in the 2-minute rounds. Also, video footage is helpful, so if you have a camera (with a tripod?), make good use of it.