Looking back on 2012 Scouting

[junefish]

Of course the season is not completely over yet--but since most teams are not attending Regional/World Championships, I thought I'd ask: how did scouting go for your team? Did you do it? If so, by what media/method?

Just wondering how other teams do it--looking forward to hearing about it.

[Grim Tuesday]

We created a massive scouting database run on a web server. Long story short, it didn't work for our first regional, and we didn't have internet at our second. But we ended up picking two excellent alliances anyways based mainly on intuition and watching matches.

[Johnbot]

My team scouted for all of our competitions (2 districts and the MAR Championship.) We originally had Excel with a few computers, and we used a VBA script to compile all of the data into a ranked list, but we ran into an issue where we were called down to alliance selection with outdated data because of how long it took to get all of the data onto a single computer.

To fix this, my team created our own scouting program in Java. One of our newer members worked on making a GUI where scouts just watched a team, and clicked on the corresponding button whenever they scored, and it worked well. Our team met to discuss the format of the program, as well as how important each bit of information was. I networked it to a server, and each scout could poll the server for data with different criteria, so we could find out about teams we were with/against very quickly. What we did because of the of power and internet in the stands of most competitions was bring seven netbooks with us (one for each of six scouts, who each watched one team a match, and one for the server), a bundoozle of Ethernet cables, an Ethernet switch box. We also had the server display a scrolling list of teams based on our calculated score of them, which was basically, AutonPoints + TeleopPoints + (theNumberOfRobotsTheyBalancedWith*2) + (ARatingOfTheirDefensiveCapability*6) + (TheNumberOfCoopBridgeBalances*9) - (TheNumberOfMatchesTheyMissed*6). We displayed this on a monitor in the stands, and a few other teams seemed to like it.
I was happy with the program, and we are hoping to make it a bit nicer so that if any other team wants to use it, it would be easy for them to do so.

[stundt1]

This year was a huge jump for us for scouting. We made scouting requirements that made each member on or team do 3 half hour shifts. We haven't really had scouting attempts in past years. Since we have a larger team we have enough students to have 6 on full time to watch robots.

At our first regional:

Pit scouting:
Pit scouting went out fine this year the sheet was very simple and easy to understand. Pit scouting in my opinion is a lot easier to manage then match scouting.

Match Scouting:
We tried it and it worked out okay. We had flaws of people not knowing when there shifts were and people not showing up. We used laminated scouting sheets to save paper and cut costs of printing. We basically entered the data into a computer and recorded almost all of the Friday matches. We found out the program wouldn't show individual match data so a good portion of our data was not use full. This was very frustrating to us.

At our Second Regional:

We changed up our match scouting and instead of laminated paper we used physical paper. Its got all the data recorded on a sheet for quick look up. It was helpful when I was coaching to go up to the scouts and take a quick look at how a team has been doing that day. We redid the scouting sheet too so we put the team on one page and had all there matches on one page so there was less paper shuffling and less paper used; You could easily look and see the teams stats by looking at one sheet instead of many.

Scouting at our second regional was a huge success and we made a great pick list from our data we gathered from paper scouting. I think personally paper scouting is easier for beginner scouting teams.

In the end:
We still ran into problems with people not paying attention and not caring.
Any ideas on how to encourage people to pay attention during scouting?

[JonathanZur1836]

Scouting has definitely grown in the past few years especially, its moved on from just pencil & paper to complicated programs that rate teams based on the information given, which is really cool.

However, even with all of this, I think that it is even more effective to just watch the matches and record the results and strategy of individual teams; NOT because teams may lie or exaggerate, but because when selecting final alliances, you don't just want to be set on the powerhouse teams, as they are often in the top 8 or picked in the first few selections.

It is important to watch teams in action so that you can determine if they fit in your game strategy or have the capability to fit your strategy. Also, it allows you to pay attention to strengths and weaknesses of other teams so that if you are strong in one skill yet lacking in another, you can scout for teams that will balance it out (no pun intended). This way, you can assemble a dynamic final alliance with strategies and capabilities in line.

Don't get me wrong here, pit to pit scouting is getting more advanced every year, and it is effective in many ways, but watching the matches should definitely be looked at as a viable and successful way of scouting.

-Jonathan Zur

[stundt1]

We use pit scouting more for generally the first couple qualification matches to see what teams generally have. The first couple matches you don't know for sure how well the teams will do.

Match scouting is better but I believe pit scouting should be something to do on top of match scouting, if you have the people and time. Yet match scouting is more important seeing how the robots do rather relying on how they look on paper.....

[rajikurbaj357]

Originally Posted by stundt1

In the end:
We still ran into problems with people not paying attention and not caring.
Any ideas on how to encourage people to pay attention during scouting?

Bring them to the pit, have a rotation between students going down to the pit and talking to the drive team about the scouting data. When they look at whats going on and actually get a visual for how helpful scouting is for the drive team, they will be more interested in helping.

[junefish]

Originally Posted by stundt1

In the end:
We still ran into problems with people not paying attention and not caring.
Any ideas on how to encourage people to pay attention during scouting?

Originally Posted by rajikurbaj357

Bring them to the pit, have a rotation between students going down to the pit and talking to the drive team about the scouting data. When they look at whats going on and actually get a visual for how helpful scouting is for the drive team, they will be more interested in helping.

Our team does both Match & Pit Scouting, although the latter occurs almost entirely on Thursday (Practice Match Day). I was head of Match Scouting & at our first regional it was ridiculous how uncaring the other 5 scouts were. There was 1 person who was a little better but it's easy to get sidetracked by the person next to you playing MineCraft (they were scouting on their own computers, since we didn't have enough team laptops). During the picklist creation I actually got asked "What's the point?" That combined with WiFi problems only got us 52% of the data

Before our second regional, however, several people--including our head mentor--made it clear just how important scouting was, and we had good onsite WiFi. I tried to nip any problems in the bud on Thursday--saying, "Okay, today you can play computer games, but not tomorrow" and I was really impressed by how much the scouts took it to heart and did a good job. At one point on Saturday we were getting 98% of the data

Overall, I think that it's important to clarify the importance of scouting ahead of time, because you'd be surprised how non-intuitive it is for some.