Let's Talk About Scouting

[CMBrandon]

I have been given some basic overview of scouting but I would like more details.

How does your team keep track of info? Paper, laptop, phone?
What exactly are you keeping track of?
How do you communicate that info back to the team?
Is there anything Cooler Master can do to help the process?

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by CMBrandon

I have been given some basic overview of scouting but I would like more details.

How does your team keep track of info? Paper, laptop, phone?

We record data on paper sheets, which are then collected and input to a laptop.

Originally Posted by CMBrandon

What exactly are you keeping track of?

We primarily track objective figures that can be turned into statistics about teams. For 2016 that meant tracking shots taken, high/low goals scored, defenses crossed, etc.

We also record noteworthy/unusual events that may have occurred during the course of a match.

Originally Posted by CMBrandon

How do you communicate that info back to the team?

Before each of our matches, one of our lead scouts prepares an information sheet for the drive team containing information about the other five robots in the match, which outlines a suggested strategy. For 2016, this sheet also contained suggested defense placements. One of these scouts then walks down from the stands to deliver this sheet to the drive team and help coordinate our strategy with our alliance partners.

Originally Posted by CMBrandon

Is there anything Cooler Master can do to help the process?

For the current evolution of our system, I don't see ways in which Cooler Master could help.

However, many teams have more computerized systems than we do. One of the challenges they face (and one of the reasons we haven't adopted a computerized system) is the integration of data from multiple sources at the venue. WiFi networks are generally not permitted in FRC venues, which causes difficulty in syncing data from multiple sources (doubly true if cellular networks have poor coverage inside the venue). If CM could provide an unobtrusive and battery powered wired networking solution for scouting laptops and/or tablets, that could make syncing scouting data simpler.

[cad321]

This thread came up a couple months ago and has some relevant info to your questions I think.

The following was a post I made in the thread above describing our scouting system from 2016:

Originally Posted by cad321

Here on 2386 we had just recently moved to electronic scouting for the 2016 season. For the years before that, scouting was normally an afterthough and carried out by only a few students and mentors. Our system this year was comprised of a custom app writen by one of our senior students an an excel spreadsheet used to analyze the data.

We would input the data collected for each robot onto one of 6 android enabled devices in the stands. Such things included how many shots on each goal vs how many successful shots on goal, completed scales, what defences were crossed and (x) amount of times etc. From here we would transfer the data from 5 of the devices onto the 6th (the one we deemed the master device) via bluetooth. After this we would export a .CSV file (a file readable by excel) from the master device with all of the raw data collected.

This is where things got a little labour intensive and where we plan to improve next year. After we had the raw data that was collected during the day, I had to manually sift through the data and move all of the data pertaining to each team into their associated worksheet on our that primary spreadsheet. This can be improved upon by writing macros in excel to do this for us. From here we could assign different weights to each "catagory" as we deemed fit. These catagories were things such as number of high goals, number of low goals, number of crossings and number of successful scales.

Finally on our master list of all the teams, a score was calaculated based on the raw data collected during the day, and the weights assigned by our scouting team to help form our picklist. As this was our first year implementing the system, we still spent time manually checking our findings in the spreadsheet, however as time goes on we hope that we can rely more and more on this system to save us time while creating our pick list.

Hopefully some of this info is helpful to you.

[jimv]

We use a scouting app that was developed by a former student. It is a web app that we access through phones and laptops. In the case of laptops we later upload our data using USB tethering to a smart phone. We keep track of data for each bot such as scoring in auto and teleop and any statistics that we can use to figure out if they will partner with us well. We use both qualitative and quantitative qualities. Our members in the pit can simply log on to the app to see up to date or mostly up to date data. A better way to provide a wired connection to laptops off of a cellular connection would be great, as two out of the three schools our members come from are provided with chromebooks, and many people have no other capable device.