I think there are a lot of teams that would like to see a single, unified scouting system.
As a driver this year, here's what I cared about
:
- Strategy used (What do they do? Score? Defend? etc.)
- How good they were (Do they actually do what they aim to do? How effective?)
- Any special abilities (eg, 111 is good at avoiding defense)
From a strategizing standpoint, we care about what they do, not the means by which they do it.
Having a centralized system could be greatly beneficial for teams. If data were collected from all the teams in a regional in a uniform manner, it is feasible that the data would be better than the data a single team could collect.
One idea is to borrow the "rating" system seen on many websites (YouTube, eBay, etc) and apply it to robots in various categories (like those mentioned above). If a significant number of teams participate, meaning there are significant numbers of contributers, you can start applying statistics to it.
The reason this works is the "wiki" principle, the wisdom of the masses. If you have a large number of people watch a match, and rank the robot on a scale (1-5, 1-10, 200-800, w/e), there tends to be a center, an average, of the ranking. (I read once that this happens at about 30 data points.) All that would be needed would be that for a match, you give a robot 5 or 6 ratings in different categories and submit it.
From discussions in IRC, there seems to be significant resistance to a collaborative scouting system amongst teams. (esp the successful ones.)
Does any of that make sense?