Quote:
Originally Posted by Ed Law
Paul,
Thanks for explaining your scouting and selection philosophy and posting your scouting data and selection list on the other post. It helps us understand how good teams select their partners.
I must say that I am very surprised you do not take into account how many moon rocks the human players attempted and scored. According to Team 188's scouting database, your human player do not attempt to score very often because your strategy is to have the human player feeds moon rocks into your robot. However we can not say that for other teams. Using your data in the raw data sheet, if you sum column F which is Moon rock scored by robots in all the matches you get 2354. And if you sum column J which is Moon rock in trailer you get 5080. This shows that only 46% of the moon rocks are scored by robots.
If we look at Team 188's database, the human player percentage ranges from 21% to 77% with a mean of about 47 and standard deviation of about 10. Since human players scored 54% of the moon rocks, picking a team that has a 60% shooter rather than a 30% shooter in a 100 point game would mean a difference of 16 points, which is quite significant. In past years the role of human player to scoring is limited. I don't know what percentage the human player should contribute to the score in an ideal game. I feel that this year their contribution to the final score is on the high side and thus scouting data should not ignore them. Another observation I have is robots can be defended but you can not defend against a good human player. They just keep putting moon rocks into trailers.
Ed
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I would have to agree that this year the human player just had too much of a contribution to scoring. FIRST is meant to be a robotics competition, and when only half, or less than half, of the scoring is done by robots, it seems to be deviating from the purpose of the game.
I also feel autonomous mode was very undervalued this year, with the only thing to do in autonomous mode really being to try to get away from a human player! Towards the end of championship, we got autonomous scoring working, but thinking back on it, it may not have been as useful, although it was impressive. Since most teams drive towards their human players, following one in order to shoot on it puts us in range of their human, who has 13 moon rocks to our 7.
It would be nice to see more of an emphasis put on getting things done in autonomous mode (think about last year with the bonus points for running laps, or the year before with the keepers that guarantee you a spot on the rack).
It would also be nice to have something done about no-show and nonfunctional robots. Of course there is no simple solution. Personally, I would like any robot that doesn't show to get a loss, regardless of how the alliance performs. The argument against this is that it encourages teams to put an inoperable bot on the field, or rush repairs too much. However, this could be fixed by having a team who's robot doesn't work at any point in the match to receive a loss also. This might seem harsh, but it goes back to the real world, where you don't get paid for a product that doesn't work.
I would also point out that while this might seem to hurt rookie teams in particular, it is often easy for rookie teams, or any team, to get help while at competition. From the example Martin gave about the team at a regional who was seeded first with 4 no-shows, Sean and myself spent a while working on their drive train until they functioned (and we didn't finish until AFTER the match we played with them, for the match we played against them). I also always go to future alliance partners, and do whatever I can to make sure they work, if there is some sort of problem.