[2017] Accuracy of scouting boiler goals...

[AMendenhall]

You're right. Redo:

Maximum volume of robot, M=34,560 inches cubed.
Volume of sphere, S=4/3*PI*2.5^3=65.5 inches cubed
Optimum packing order of spheres, P=0.74
Maximum amount of balls in robot: M*P/S=391.

I revoke my skepticism about 100 balls being dumped into a goal.

[Bronze]

Originally Posted by AMendenhall

Maximum volume of robot, M=34,560 inches cubed.

Don't forget that that volume includes the bumpers... ~3.25 inches from each side of the robot that the frame perimeter must be held within. So maximally, robots themselves can actually only be 23718 cubic inches (and thats in the short orientation, its actually less in the tall orientation, at 21573 cubic inches).

Keep in mind that the random packing density is maximally 64% (optimal planned packing is higher, but thats not going to happen during a match). So we take the number of fuel that an empty space of the size that the robot could fit in to be only 231. Now consider that the robot needs electronics, a frame, wheels, and some mechanism to actually dump the balls, and I think you'd be lucky to see 100, maybe 150 ball dumps, if that's all the robot does.

Now for the discussion of scouting, we are considering the following for our electronic scouting app (that we plan to release before competitions start):

- go around before matches start and ask teams what the maximum number of fuel their robot can hold is, save that data in our app
- during match scouting, have a slider to estimate (to nearest 5 for low goal) the number of fuel scored by a robot, with a marker / upper limit just above the maximum capacity that the team reported their robot being able to score. Gives our scouters a way of visually going - "their robot looks about half full, so must be half of the number they reported", etc.

[logank013]

I've talked about this with a few other members of my team since I'm the scout guy on our team. I'm sort of at a loss. We've had "super scouters" before. It'd be 1 per alliance along with 1 per robot. That means we'll need 8 scouts a match which might be a problem for us. But I've thought about designating super scouters where their whole job is to count how many balls each team on that alliance scores in the goals. It will be really hard to count low goals but high should be fairly easy. Good thing I have 6 weeks to figure this out...

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Bronze

Don't forget that that volume includes the bumpers... ~3.25 inches from each side of the robot that the frame perimeter must be held within. So maximally, robots themselves can actually only be 23718 cubic inches (and thats in the short orientation, its actually less in the tall orientation, at 21573 cubic inches).

We're playing with unreasonable numbers either way, but I feel like I should point out that your fuel tank can indeed extend over your bumpers so long as it starts within your frame perimeter. The only mandatory volume loss is the volume of the bumpers themselves (but for that matter the battery and other required components).

In terms of scouting it, your first general pass won't need to be very specific. You might just write Low/Med/High on the forms and wait a few matches at your event to help your scouts get a feel of each and set standards based on your alliance selection needs. One of the most useful metrics will be how fast an alliance hits 40 kPa and how much (cycles and which goal) a team had to do with it. By the time specifics really matter (District and Half Champs), the community will have built up a whole jargon for handling this, and your scouts will have the benefit of experience. Too often I see teams get overwhelmed trying to collect more detail than they need or are ready for and miss the forest for the trees.

[GeeTwo]

I haven't thought this through in detail, but perhaps if the scouts monitor the pressure level before and following a dump, you can at least get an estimate. Of course, if somebody is feeding the high-efficiency boiler at the same time, this will cause significant uncertainty.

At a deeper level: It is difficult to see how the low efficiency boiler is going to matter in any significant way, unless a high boiler scorer is just a bit slower than needed to reach 40 kPa (and even then, it would be better to feed the high goal shooter somehow). (Assuming just the original 10 of 1 robot in auto), in order to get 40 kPa, you would need to put about 330 fuel into the low goal in 105-135 sec, which means about 3 per second if you want to climb the rope. As the low efficiency boiler only has a capacity of about 50-60 fuel, and processes it at a maximum rate of 5 per second, this means that you make about six deliveries of 60 fuel about 20 seconds apart from each other. Honestly, that's way more impressive than a robot that can deliver three deliveries of 50 fuel into the high efficiency boiler every 45 seconds.

[bdaroz]

I think a lot of this conversation is ignoring a potentially important data source:

TBA API

The match endpoints in the API will have the 2017 game score breakdown. What exactly that will be is still TBD, but given past breakdowns, and the fact that high and low goals need to be separately tracked, the API should have an accurate scored count.

If you have 1 bot doing all the low goals, you can get an accurate count, same as if there's only 1 high shooter. Then have the scouts approximate the contributions when more than one bot is scoring in a goal.

[throwaway]

I don't think this is just a low goal issue, while it won't be impossible to count high goals scored it will certainly be difficult. In a high level match we're probably going to see upwards of 120 balls scored and that point I don't think it makes sense to ask scouts to count each ball scored.

The smarter move would be to ask scouts to count missed shots only instead of those scored. Also if you could get truthful pit scouting information about the ball capacity of a robot.

[Skyehawk]

I have talked earlier this year about qualitative scouting, this may be the perfect time for it. Keep in mind, at best scouting a team is an estimate. If you can approximate certain aspects of the game and back solve to get the variable (balls in goal) this shouldn't be too difficult. Keeping a count on team cycles, approximate balls scored (and where), and an approximate accuracy should lead to reasonably accurate data. The most important thing is to have a strong basis for comparison that is consistent and you have confidence in.

[mathking]

Originally Posted by Siri

We're playing with unreasonable numbers either way, but I feel like I should point out that your fuel tank can indeed extend over your bumpers so long as it starts within your frame perimeter. The only mandatory volume loss is the volume of the bumpers themselves (but for that matter the battery and other required components).

In terms of scouting it, your first general pass won't need to be very specific. You might just write Low/Med/High on the forms and wait a few matches at your event to help your scouts get a feel of each and set standards based on your alliance selection needs. One of the most useful metrics will be how fast an alliance hits 40 kPa and how much (cycles and which goal) a team had to do with it. By the time specifics really matter (District and Half Champs), the community will have built up a whole jargon for handling this, and your scouts will have the benefit of experience. Too often I see teams get overwhelmed trying to collect more detail than they need or are ready for and miss the forest for the trees.

This. The number one mistake I see in scouting is teams collecting a lot of detail that they don't need. For scoring, we are going to try to keep a count of cycles with general categories for number of balls in each cycle. We are hoping to use the scoring data from each match to get the amount of fuel scored and divide that up among the teams on each alliance based on our observations. The fallback position if this proves to tough is to use a scale (probably 5 points from awesome to bad) and cycle time as a proxy.

In any event, collecting relevant data is a great thing to do scouting wise. But in my experience you also need to have scouts making subjective judgments and recording those. Things like "they get in their allies way a lot" or "the driver adapts well to changing conditions on the field" or even "wow that driver is amazing." Over the years this has served us well in finding good alliance partners and in picking good strategies against opponents. I recall one year when we were the first pick of a really good team who refused our suggestion for the second pick because "we don't ever pick teams with mecanum drive." The mecanum drive robot was picked next, and proved to be the decisive factor in our loss to the other alliance. To their credit, the team that picked us came over to our pit as we were packing up and said "We really should have listened to you."