Scouting Before Regionals

[jrl5595]

Besides general performance at competition, how should this year be scouted? For example, does anyone else scout team's websites beforehand to get an idea of their competition? And if so, how would be the best way to do that? I'm having trouble finding current information on most teams. With it being the start of week five, I understand that there may not be much information for this year's competition yet, but maybe you guys have ideas on where to find more.

[Abhishek R]

I don't really think you will gain any valuable information before competition. You may be able to find a few bots from your regional beforehand, but that's like 3/60 teams, a very trivial amount.

[Steven Donow]

If you're at an early-season competition, prescouting is VERY hard, and honestly, borderline worthless. Late season, its nice to have, but not an essential. Over the past few seasons my prescouting has involved simply a binder or word document with the records/awards/any notable info of teams, as well as a photograph, which sometimes is fairly hard to do.

[who716]

Since New England is a district this year I put together a spread sheet of where all the teams will be competing at and I found that by going to three event I will be able to see every team that will be going to our 2nd district event.

[BrendanB]

Typically I will do some pre-scouting leading up to our events.

From year to year there are many teams in our area who are consistent contenders for a successful season so not only do we want to keep an eye on them we also want to get a feel for the entire field of competition as well as how the game is played and changes. In the past I have always competed during week 1 and this is the first year my team is holding off to compete during week 2. In previous years we would try to learn what we could from local scrimmage events and an unveiling event that a local team hosted on the weekend of bag/ship date so going into our week 1 event we were very blind and usually used past performance as a good reference for how a team would do/who to watch out for. Lucky for us, New England has several regionals all within 2-3 hours of Windham so after our week 1 event a group of us would go out to the WPI and Boston regionals in person to scout out/watch upcoming competitors and cheer on our friends. We also watched webcasts of other regionals we couldn't day trip to watch the game being played around the country and local competitors we were playing with soon.

Using this strategy we have been able to have a better knowledge base of teams going into our events but also keep an eye on the game throughout these events to better strategize our optimize our robot.

I have heard of a few teams being heavy on the pre-scouting and while it is valuable, you must take it with a grain of salt. Sadly, there are many teams who perform better at their first event than they do at their second for various reasons many of which have happened to us. Robot breaking, new drivers, code bugs, field issues, tougher field, etc can all cause a robot to perform worse than they did at a previous point in the year.

The reason I point this out is that many teams will pick or strategize based off of previous performance. Pre-scouting is a great education tool to see how a team/robot is doing but always use data from that competition as the metric for determining performance. If you notice a huge difference, talk to the team to find out what's up. Many times a team can chase down the technical glitch during their final matches before eliminations returning them to their prior performance but I know many teams don't scout heavily on Saturday morning.

Just some thoughts but pre-scouting is a very, very effective tool when used wisely!

[lf3307]

We are planning to circulate a Google spreadsheet next week to all participants in our district events (Nashua, NH and WPI, MA), and ask them to fill out info about their bots on a voluntary basis. This format will also allow them to ask questions, and provide grist for thinking/planning leading up to the competition. We'll see how it goes!

[PVCpirate]

It will be hard to get accurate information before teams get to the events. The best thing to do for what you're thinking is to walk around the pits on the first day of the event, and check out all the robots.

[Citrus Dad]

We did almost no pre-scouting last year before our Week 1 regional, but our in competition scouting system provided us a clear advantage when we went through the draft. We won the regional. Pre scouting our next regional was of some value, but we had to have an elaborate algorithm to translating 2012 data to 2013. I suspect that this year's data will have little relationship to 2013 because the games are so different. Otherwise, we haven't found pit scouting of much value because the field scouts can see the most pertinent characteristics of the robots, e.g., wheels, drivetrain etc.