Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
This situation is what whiteboards were made for. Been using one since the beginning of 2013 and never looked back. That way your entire scouting team can discuss and determine each pick, not just one person.
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Sadly whiteboards don't always work as intended.
Looking at you 67 & 1310 at IRI in 2013 when a "3467" whiteboard turned into "3476" on the field. We still love you guys!
I agree that to prevent bad picks the best solution is to have a competent scout on the field who knows the capabilities of the robots attending, knows the strengths/weaknesses of your machine, and knows what robot types you need to pick to execute your elimination strategy(s). Like Chris said a good second option is to have a good representative on the field with some information and a "decision team" which includes a group of people who've been going over the data and watching the teams.
This year we always sent our captain out with a list of 24-26 robots ranked in the order we'd pick them as well as using a whiteboard with cellphones as a backup. To have a full list prepared for our captain meant scouting ended at the close of day one qualifications. This gave us plenty of time to make our picklists without staying up late the night before and we used the final qualification rounds to observe the machines we had in our top 24 to determine final rank. Sometimes machines were taken off the list or others added on seeing them improve on the second day.
It also helps not to overthink your second pick by coming up with one or two must have items for your third pick and consider "bonus" items that would be nice to have but not necessary especially if they haven't been consistent. This year we saw that most alliances we would end up on or first round selections we would make left us needing a third robot to cross a more specialized defense if we wanted to get a full 30 point autonomous. This meant our first sort of third picks was only machines who had demonstrated they could cross the Ramparts in autonomous with moderate consistency as our data also included attempts. With that list in mind we added in if they could cross the CDF or Portcullis in teleop as it wasn't our strongest defenses to cross and typically wouldn't be the same for most of our potential partners. Then we added in balls scored in teleop in the low goals as another item to add to our list.
That was typically how we picked a third robot we felt would mesh well with our alliance and received three amazing robots: 6161, 6153, 6969, as well as our Boston backup 5563 who was high up on our third pick choices.
This is a little long but just some simple advice on how teams can make better choices while sharing some methods that I've found that help take some work out of making picklists.