Originally Posted by EricH
Any robot can be beaten, with the right strategy.
The problem is, you need to know that strategy.
To remove the scouting from the equation removes any chance of your knowing that strategy.
I'm going to go back to 2005. With the #10 pick, 330 picked team 503. We would not have known that they were a diamond in the rough if we had not been scouting. We were very surprised that they were still available. A few hours later, and teams 330, 67, and 503 were hoisting some largish trophies and wearing some nice, shiny new medals after winning the Championship. Without scouting, there is a very good chance that we would have been knocked out in the division eliminations.
Eliminate your scouting--and have fun being eliminated. Keep your scouting, and improve it.
When I'm scouting, I couldn't care less about the technical stuff like # of wheels, arm/lift. What I care about if I'm scouting is: What is the robot doing in automode? What is the robot doing in teleop? What is the robot doing in the endgame? How well is it doing it? Does it break down often? And finally, How well does their team interact with our team? The last item is the only one that can't really be done objectively.
I'm also going to add on to what Joe was saying. We've done pen/pencil and paper for a while; the team has recently started doing other methods. (Wiimote, or something like that, IIRC). The data is input into a computer, and the pit scouting stuff is in a different place. Friday night strategy meeting goes something like this: "How do we want to play our matches tomorrow?" "Well, teams X, Y, Z have this, that, and the other, so this might be good." "OK, now, who do we want to pick/be picked by?" *hour-long debate culminating in "Keep an eye on these X teams, and if you see anybody else, let us know. These Y teams, we don't want to pair with, but don't tell them that."*
In 2005, we had a simple system: How many tetras did a team score, and where? 2006, with game objects flying everywhere, we used a "on a scale of 1-3, how good are they at X" along with "Where do they go in automode?" 2007 returned to a how many/where scouting method, which would also work for 2010 (and 2008).
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