Scouting Questions

[MrJohnston]

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

At champs last year I went to every* team in Hopper and asked them 2 or 3 questions. "how much do you weigh", if the answer to the weight was really close to 120 i asked if they could remove any weight. and "if i give you something to put on your robot would you put it on?" Which is basically asking if teams are willing to be cheesecaked but i wanted the teams to really think about what I was asking.

I did this all while not wearing a 2826 shirt to get honest answers. Every team that the question was asked seriously to (see below) that said no to being cheesecaked was automatically removed from consideration if they didn't have elite level can burglars.

I'm not saying that cheesecaking will happen to the degree it had last year. I'm just pointing out that teams should honestly consider having it done to their robot after an honest and humble review of their robots capabilites (which by Championships should be blatantly obvious)

And no I'm not saying that you were incorrect in saying no flat out, I'm just adding more to the conversation of teams who say no but really should say yes.



*Yes I asked 987 and 33 and 948 and etc even though I new the answer would be no.

You definitely did not ask 948. We were in Curie.

[EricLeifermann]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

You definitely did not ask 948. We were in Curie.

9 and 5 are close to each other

[mjc49]

I second that networking tends to be more valuable than the data collected, though a picture is the most valuable piece of data. If teams have information about their bots to hand out, then great, we don't have to ask a lot of questions, but the interactions make a big impression on the students.

[Sunnykx]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

My team has never, not once, used results from pit scouting for anything - the results you get from that never match up with the actual results from the field!

That said, it's a highly useful tool for us to use to force students to get out there and mingle, and learn a little about other robots!

This year might be a little different, though... asking teams which defenses they can handle (with appropriate followup questions to understand how they actually handle each defense) could be very useful, at least in the beginning. And depending on how things go, you may or may not see a team even attempt one or more specific defenses for the entire qual matches! Either the defense won't be on the field for some matches, or one of their alliance members will do it, or they'll tackle other ones first and get their RP without needing to touch it. It could be very interesting to see how that goes!

I actually looked at the information from our Pit Scouting sheets at World's this last year. I stayed up all night before the elimination rounds and searched through all of our pit scouting sheets to see which robots could pick up a sideways can. We didn't have sufficient information regarding this from our match data. It heavily influenced the choice of our 3rd robot - who could pick up sideways cans beautifully. We were captain of our alliance and made to the finals in Curie. Our sideways-can-picking up robot made a huge difference for us.

I agree that Pit Scouting often is not very useful. It seems to be most helpful at the beginning of competitions when you have no data on a team - or - when you're desperately searching the night before eliminations for some extra information that could make a difference in competition.

[Citrus Dad]

We have two types of pit scouting, and we don't leave these to random members of our team:

1) Pictures of the robots to use for ID purposes in our scouting. This done before competition starts by a trained team member. Smile!
2) Evaluation of specific metrics, including bring measuring devices and other equipment. This is done by senior team members (often subteam leads) and mentors. This is usually done during the competition on a subset of teams.

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

We have two types of pit scouting, and we don't leave these to random members of our team:

1) Pictures of the robots to use for ID purposes in our scouting. This done before competition starts by a trained team member. Smile!
2) Evaluation of specific metrics, including bring measuring devices and other equipment. This is done by senior team members (often subteam leads) and mentors. This is usually done during the competition on a subset of teams.

Very similar to what we do. Always check TBA first to see if there's a picture of the robot we can easily get without having to get pictures at the event. This season, we're cutting back pit scouting a lot to only contain the basic metrics we need for filtering of teams. Once we know if there's any specific questions we want to ask certain teams, that happens late friday or early saturday. When doing this, I usually wear a black sweatshirt over my team shirt to keep answers unbiased and to make sure I don't cause any false pretenses.