[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

What is the main focus of your scouting, is it for strategy? For picking partners in finals? A little of both? Something else entirely?

The intention was for both, but the reality was we only used to for picking partners most of the time, because we didnt have a good enough system of running the info back to the drive team until our 3rd regional. Then we used a few times (once even to call our alliance member on their abilities! eep!)

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

What information is important for your scouts to collect? Drive train, arm info, etc.

We do two sets of scouting, one is "pit scouting" where we get basic info on their robot and their claims of what they can do, the other is "match scouting" in which we have people watching the matches and noting everything they could about what the robots did, the scores, etc. We also ended up developing a third ranking system (I think it was based on 73's) where we had one person sit and watch nearly all the matches, and they would rate each team in about 15 different categories on an excel sheet, each sections were given weights, and then the total gave us our own internal rank. So we pretty much watched all the robots for what they could do, how many they could stack, how high they reached, etc. In addition to getting notes on robot description features.

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

How much set-up time goes into preparation for your team's scouting?

There was quite a lot for us, especially because we learned after every regional. By nationals we just did pit scouting, the excel sheet, and a reduced version of the match scouting which mostly covered how many tetras could be stacked in one match by each robot and notes on it. So every time we headed off to competition, we spent probably 10 or more hours of prep.

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

How many people are usually involved in the scouting, and how much time are they expected to put in?

Everyone on our team gets involved. There are about 5 people on the strategy/drive team plus myself that lead it up, the rest of the team is expected to sign up for times to do one of the three types of scouting we did. It depends on the number of people we had at each competition, but my guess is that everyone put in at least 3 hours of scouting.

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

How many teams do you scout at your regional?

All of them. At Rochester I think it was 32, Cleveland 43, Toronto 64 (I think).

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

When is your scouting usually "done" by? Is it ready on Friday for the first match, or is it only used in finals? Somewhere in between?

I sort of mentioned this, we tried to get our pit scouting done on thursday during practice rounds. All thursday and friday we watched matches and did match & excel scouting, then saturday if we were in good standing (which we were at all 3 regionals) we continued scouting on saturday morning.

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

What methods do you use for your scouting? Randomly scribbled notes? Fill-in the blank scout sheets? Statistical analysis? Match Records? Something else? Extra feedback here would be very helpful.

By the end, we found the scout sheets ineffective and cumbersome. The most useful was the excel sheet of rankings, second was the teams ranked by the number of tetras they actually scored in a match, third were the pit sheets to get a general idea of what the robot did. Along with the pit sheets, we also took photos of every robot so we could remember what they looked like. That was really valuable.

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

How much of your scouting is done on a computer? (Includes those print-offs)

In the end it was 60% computer, and 30% pit sheets.

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

How effective/successful is your scouting?

I would say ours worked well for us in the end (as we learned). We spent a lot of time after the first regional trying to go through our pounds of notes to handrank each team, and that kind of worked, but by cleveland and toronto we had a really good ranking system. We even used our rankings in toronto to help the second place team (we were selected by the first) to select their 3rd partner!


Cyberguy, this sounds like a really awesome idea, and I would bet my strategy/drive team would love to help. I will suggest it to them, it might be after school starts until they get back to you, but its a really great idea Keep up the good work!