Who is hanging and how?

[eedoga]

I'm sure our team is guilty of a lie or two, but...I should explain. Our first two years we showed up with robots that were completely untested, and based on ideas that came from people who had very little experience actually building anything of this size.

We also had a problem with team membership shifting...Our first year we had six people, two of which had never seen the robot before taking it out of the crate at the competition. Our second year wasn't much better.

I think good scouting comes down to asking the right questions.

How many practice matches have you had?

What happened, or how did your robot do?

What problems have you run into and how did you solve them?

Take pictures of the robot (as other people have said)
And collect data during actual matches.

Awe said things like, we are going to try to hang, but in half the matches our robot ended up on its side, with a ball stuck in the kicker, and a missing wheel... The one time we did hook the bar we learned that 2CIM motors on a simple box were not enough to lift 135 or so pounds and ripped one of our bumpers off.

The thing is we learned...we are better now...but all of the things we said we thought were true at the time.

[Dr Theta]

I agree with the above post. Pit scouting is only useful if you ask the right questions. The questions proposed above have very valuable information in them.

Have you played in any practice matches? Did you participate in a preship scrimmage? How did you perform? What problems did you encounter and how did you solve them?

These all include information that is very valuable to you in gauging the general preparedness of a team which can play a huge factor in performance. If they encounter a problem that they haven't fixed, don't intend to fix, or don't know how to fix it tells you a lot about the preparedness of the robot. If they have played several practice matches, built a duplicate robot, or attended a preship scrimmage it tells you something about the preparedness of their drive-team.

You will get actual data on how they perform on the field by field scouting anyway which is undoubtedly more accurate than a guess from a team that has yet to play the game. I intend to implement these types of questions in our pit scouting this year, and this is the type of information that we attempt to be upfront about when others come to scout us.