How did your scouting work?

[EricH]

I'm just curious to know, how good was your scouting work, and what was your approach?

[Beth Sweet]

Not so great. Rule #1 that I learned: As opposed to getting information that I think is relevant, talk to the drive coach and drive team and ask what information they want. I had my kids fill out these elaborate sheets asking for drivetrain descriptions and when I handed them to my drive coach, he used about 3 of the sections of the about 20 sectioned sheets. Moral? Ask the people who are going to use the info what info they want.

[Paul H]

Originally Posted by Beth Sweet

Not so great. Rule #1 that I learned: As opposed to getting information that I think is relevant, talk to the drive coach and drive team and ask what information they want. I had my kids fill out these elaborate sheets asking for drivetrain descriptions and when I handed them to my drive coach, he used about 3 of the sections of the about 20 sectioned sheets. Moral? Ask the people who are going to use the info what info they want.

I learned that scouts should include information about all of the teams at the regional, because the drive team is not happy when they're about to play and there's no information on the opponents.

[Jverdon]

I was happy with my scouts, we had a simple form that detailed all the important things, It was my job as the scout captain to take what they gave me and turn it into something that the drive team could use. The one thing I forgot to put on my Forms but had my scouts do on saturday, was write how to win with a team and how to beat a team. Many people believe scouting is not imporant it is important to allaince picking, but very important to the drive team so they can expect what to get out of a team that they ether face or are allained with. All in all my scouts did a great job and i am proud of them.

[Heretic121]

scouting...

the basis of scouting comes from your eyes, and nothing else... no words or phamplets or flyers can make up for what your eyes see from the bot and drivers on the field... You can't look at rankings or QP's or alliance points per match, but only individual #'s for that team... The absolute best thing to do is look at teams from thier match to match performance rather than just 1 match *which might have happened this year at nats with a lot of good teams not picked*

that is just the basis... from my list... i was pretty down on the 7 top picks, my # 8 didnt go, and about 4 of my 9-16 went and only about 2 of my 17-24 went... where as from BAE over 19 of the 24 i had on my list were chosen... *by my list i mean the teams list *... that number alone should show how diffrent the scouting was at nationals compared to BAE and regionals at that...

*note our core scouting team at BAE was about 2-3 people and Nats was 4-6 people...

[Francis-134]

There were only two real scouts on my team with a host of other people that off and on helped us out. One person (me) would go around on Thursday and fill out sheets on every team. The sheets included information about a team's arm, end effector, drivetrain and how well they did at regionals. At this same time, my counterpart in the stands would, with the help of some other team members, count the number of tetras each team managed to stack in a match. After I had finished all my sheets, I would help him out with the counting. At one point, it was three teams per person (one alliance for him, one for me). This continued through all the practice matches and the qualification rounds. In the end, it allowed us to easially see who we were up against, and get a very accurate list of teams for picking.

[IronVulture]

234's scouting is done all by sight, we make a sheet for each team and record their personal match points, robot feature, and comments. It works really well if you have a sizable enough team. Give each scouter a clipboard with anywhere from five or six or ten to eleven team sheets. Be careful past that though, because if somebody has more than one team in a match it gets pretty hectic to try and keep track of both robots. The primary problem with this is that then you have several people pinned to the stands at any given time. This keeps people who could be working in the pit or talking to other teams from doing so. We've had drafting problems with people not knowing of us before from this, so who knows?

Ask Dognaux about it though, if you want serious scouting organization. He's the lead scouter and I guarantee he knows more than me.

[Cyberguy34000]

Scouting for our team was fairly last minute. To be honest, in the past we really haven't needed scouting because we usually either

a.) Make high seed and can pick whoever we want

b.) Are picked for finals because we've got a cool bot.

But this year, with the increased strategy and whatnot, we did put a scouting effort together, but it was fairly last minute. Both for regionals and nationals. So it ended up being 2-3 people doing all of the scouting.

At both regionals and nationals the philosophy going into scouting was that this was going to be only the most relevant information that the drive team could use on moments notice.

Don't know what other teams usually do with the info when it's compiled. For us, the drive team didn't really want scouting to hand a binder to them and look through all of it, but preferred that they have a scouting member on hand to give out information when they needed it in planning.

At regionals it was hastily written hand scribbled notes that were turned into a double sided sheet with sections for each team with Good: (transmission, low CG, crab drive, speed, traction, etc.) Bad: (KB wheels, Tipping, etc) and Strat: (goes for home row in first min.). Needless to say, transcribing took a good 4 hours or so, was a serious headache, and while it was useful, it could have been more organized. Picking alliance partners in finals was difficult because we got low seed, and it was hard to see, out of who was left, the overall quality of the bots remaining. We picked good alliance partners, but it could have been made a lot easier.

So at nationals we went the other way, 6 printed sheets (could have done 3 double-sided) with fill in the blank info. Pre-nat scouting got us the team # and names, and we would have had pictures if I hadn't counted on a free computer/printer at the hotel (doh). See thread. At least a few other teams found it useful.

The scouting sheet actually worked quite well, and information was quickly at hand whenever it was needed, the rate-it opinion bubbles worked very well, though it would have been useful to coordinate our scales beforehand

In hindsight the sheet worked pretty well but some things could have been eliminated and wouldn't have been missed. Knowing whether or not teams had treads or KB wheels didn't help a whole lot, and traction was very very difficult to actually gage. So that ended up being useless. Instead of a check list for Auto code, it should have been a fill-in line with each line being a different program. Auto code was very difficult to read. Should have added a strategy section along with good and bad, and replaced traction gage with CG because most bots ended up with medium center of gravity, of which many were on the high or low side.

Overall it turned out pretty good. And it gives us a lot of things to look out for next year. Preparing for next year, our scouting will probably be slimmed out even more, but for a first year effort, it turned out OK.

Now to plan for next season...

[Chris Fultz]

Ryan D leads this for 234, and someone has some tough shoes to fill for 2006.

The system was simple and effective. Paper sheets that told number of tetras, auto mode action, and a small space for notes. Before each match, Ryan would come down to our pit with the papers on our partners and opponents. It made making a strategy very easy. Whenwe were done, Ryan took tha papers back to contiue to add data.

I will also say that a good scouting system helps keep everyone 'honest' and the strategies more accurate. You can make a realistic plan based on how robots are really performing. For example, it does no good to make an alliance strategy based on a team saying they can score "4 every match" when you have data that shows it was only 1 or 2.

[sebas2mil]

well as far as 1251 goes we had friday and thursday as one of the major scouting days

we had 6 laptops and all connected to a switch that went and pulled the input page of our webbased program so we could input the data of the teams as the matches went on. so pretty much we had one person per robot on friday we communicated through the phone to the pits to pass the data so we could do a little strategy before the matches

on saturday we brought the laptpo back and forth to the matches with me and the little media oass so we could look at our oponets strenghts and weaknesses and same with our allies to form a good startegy


sebas

[Ethulin]

We used our freely available PHP based scouting app. We had 6 scouts, 4 from our team, 2 from 694. It worked out ok, we had such a horrible view, so we missed some stuff.

I feel pretty bad though, on the day of the eliminations I tried to find some one from 694. I looked for a while, went to their pit, but was still not able to find them.

Well I finally found them. Sadly it was when we were up against them! I offered to set up an adhoc right then, but they said don't bother, if we beat you then you can. Well we beat them, and I am still pretty pissed off, because I know I would not be happy if my team put work into something and was unable to reap the rewards.

But for our alliance was our scouting data was VERY helpfully. We were the 8th alliance, 2nd pick, so normally a team in that situation does not have much of a say, but we showed them our scouting data and they were very interested, so we did allot of strategy organizing.

Well 8th seed alliance got devision finalists! so I guess it paid off.

Shout out to 1108 and 447, two $@#$@#$@#$@# good alliance partners, quite to upset to go from 8th seed to devision finalists.

[Not2B]

Our scouting was AMAZING this year. Go Julie for running it all. First year our scouting really was useful.

Low tech - best way to go.

Each team had a sheet. First, look at them in the pits. Then, for each match they played, the sheet would come out, and observations would be recorded.

But here was the key... shortly before each of our matches the head scouter would review all data for each team in the match. It would go onto a summary sheet, and a runner would take it down to the drive team. There, the drive team and alliances would be able to review the op-force info, as well as what our partners REALLY could do. (How many times has a team "embeleshed" their skills??)

I credit our scouters for many of our best matches. We knew EXACTLY who to interfere with, and when our alliance stacking would be faster than the other team. (Yes... I mean time... average time per tetra was important to us.)

Julie said she was going to explain our scouting in a white paper this summer, because we thought is was good and unique. And it should be good no matter the game or year.

[Joe J.]

Yeah our scouting rocked. As the driver I can say they helped us win our matches. The summery sheets were great seeing as we had time to talk to our alliance partners (robot never broke down) we got a lot of planning in before each match. What was also nice was we had review sheets of each of our matches ya know what actually happened those of us on the drive team could get a full picture of what we did right and wrong in each match.

[EricH]

One trick we did was to go around on Thursday and either talk to the teams or get a picture of every robot (a tedious process). When we had that info, we could compare it (somewhat) to the records on Friday to see if a team was using hyperbole in describing what they could do. Our scouting worked really well during both regionals we went to and nationals. It morphed a bit, but remained mostly the same as when I put it together during build.

[alphaone]

Team 254 had an excellent scouting team this year. I'm sure the "scouting czar" for our team aka Chuck can explain it all better than I but I'll give it a shot, as I was a scout for the team.

We made a really cool scouting form using Excel. Maybe Chuck or Justin can post the actual file sometime so teams can see how ours was. And also during the regionals and nats we had a laptop with us in the stands running a specially made Excel sheet where we inputted all of the stats we gathered after each match, so we had real time stats and rankings on hand. It really came in handy later when we had questions about how much a team was scoring. Anyways, basically we had a form for each team, where we had a section for pit scouting up at the top, then below that a spot to put stats, observations and ratings for the practice matches and quals. Each scout would scout one team during the match and fill out the form for the match. We would usually try to rotate each teams forms to different scouts for each match to try to get an unbiased opinion of the team. Then on friday night the whole scouting team met in a room in the hotel with the drive team and discussed stuff for saturdays matches and which teams stood out and stuff (possible alliances). Also which teams looked like they were having problems so we could go talk to them in the morning about the problems they were having so we could maybe help them fix it and stuff. On wednesday we also had our main photography guy go around and take Polaroids of each team in our division so we could tape the pics to the scouting forms. Everything worked out really well. I was really impressed with how everything worked out. A few teams even saw how serious we were scouting the quals and stuff (we had absolutely no spirit during the quals lol) and they asked to see our scouting form so we gave them copies

I hope our scouting team next year will be as good as the one we had this year.