Best way to estimate the best defense bot

[Louisiana Jones]

Originally Posted by dellagd

Im sprucing up our scouting system for our next event and would really like do work defense into it.

As of now, we have 6 scouts (+ a head scout but he/she does different things), and they all watch every match.

I have heard of DPR, and have a crude understanding that its basically the same calc as OPR but using the opponents score, but Ive heard this is inaccurate.

I could give each scout a slider of 1 - 5 in "How well does robot play defense", but this is purely objective.

How does your team do it? Is DPR actually useful?

I'm a newbie at scouting, but after working this year with a student to create a scouting system for our team to use, we have determined that OPR is the single best indicator of the offensive/defensive capability of a robot. OPR is misnamed. Everything we have tested indicates that it accounts for both the offensive and defensive contributions of a robot to a high degree of accuracy. While there are some weaknesses with OPR the advantages are that it is easy to calculate with available data that doesn't need to be scouted, and when combined with data from your scouts can give you a perfect idea of the offensive and defensive contributions of a robot. DPR is also misnamed and therefore seems inaccurate when used to describe how good a robot is defensively. DPR isn't simply a defense ranking, and if you try to use it that way will always seem inaccurate.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Louisiana Jones

I'm a newbie at scouting, but after working this year with a student to create a scouting system for our team to use, we have determined that OPR is the single best indicator of the offensive/defensive capability of a robot.

For this year, it might be (I remain unconvinced of OPR as an indicator of the best robot, particularly when planning elimination strategy).

For next year, it might not be. There are some years where OPR works well, and other years where it's as bad as the W-L-T seeding system with too few matches (like 8!).

[SkittlesCharge]

To keep track of defensive bots this year, we used both pit scouting and match scouting. We rated the drive train's speed, pushing power (torque), and manueverability on a 1 to 5 scale. Then we also kept track of the number of times the robot pushed another robot, blocked another robot, pushed a robot while it was shooting, and blocked shots to see what kind of defense it played.

While we didn't get to pick partners at any regionals this year, but it seemed to work fairly well. Except for two easily fixable major problems (the 1 to 5 scale's default was 1, making many average robots look bad and in pushing matches back and forth it was hard to decide the number of pushes to award the robot), the system could tell us how good a robot was at blocking full court shooters, or if it tried to push robots frequently, but was just too slow to catch them, etc.

I wouldn't recommend using a system exactly like ours was this year, but hopefully an idea or two from it would be helpful to you.