Minibot Scouting

[CallieJ]

Our team is not that large and most of our members are rookies. Because of this we're trying to keep our scouting simple, so our minibot ranking so far is three columns in a table:

1. Minibot success/fail (we'll keep track of all matches to see if it begins to work or breaks badly) with a yes/no response

2. Ranking the minibot on a scale of 1-5 (0 if the team doesn't have one). This is a subjective comparison to the other minibots the scout has observed. Not ideal, but simple. Our database will average and be able to rank the values, as well as showing the individual match values so we can see possible improvement.

3. Ranking the minibot deployment on a scale of 1-5 (again, 0 if not present). We've found from our observations that deployment is nearly as important as the actual minibot. After all, if you can't get it on the tower how can it win?

Because we're a small, fairly inexperienced team we've found that we work better with simpler calculations and easily learned/recorded systems. In the past we've barely had enough scouts to have one scout per team, so we wanted to keep it fairly simple to learn and operate.

I know a lot of older teams have more effective solutions, but I thought I'd share some of our ideas. If you have any suggestions for other things we can do manually (one computer for compiling but the rest is paper) that might work better, that would be a great help.