Competition Scouting

[Mike Soukup]

Ah yes, the annual threads about scouting. Don't worry, I won't spam as much or be as annoying as I was last year

The scouting program that David, Raul, and Cory are talking about is WASH, a set of Palm & PC applications developed by a Wildstang student and myself. Other teams (like 45, 100, and about 10 others that haven't been mentioned in this thread) that used the Palm program to scout uploaded the data to our laptop and we then gave copies of the PC database to the teams that helped us scout. This way all the teams had all the data. After (and sometimes during) the competition we also uploaded all our data to SOAP so they could make it available on their website for everyone.

Another great Palm scouting program was created by 312 - Heatwave. I saw it for the first time in FL and loved it. It actually inspired me to improve the functionality and usabilty of WASH.

Jack, you're already thinking along the correct lines with respect to the rating scale. It's tough to get two different people to give the same rating to a bot. That's why we tried (sometimes unsuccessfully) to use objective data, like drive time to goal, and number of balls picked up & scored. But it's not possible to break everything down into objective data, and a subjective rating is necessary. Try to give your scale meaning; instead of simply 1-5, tell people that a 1 means the bot couldn't even push a goal and a 5 means they could drag 3 goals and 2 other bots across the field. Tell people that a 5 is reserved for a "best in class" type robot.

Mike