How 492 won the PAC NW regionals

[Goldeye]

Great job on winning, 492! Such a scouting database is quite an impressive feat. Having scouts focused enough to keep such a complete record is no doubt a challenge, and very nice work on the backend too. Our plan was to do something similar with manual input to a spreadsheet, but our scouts in the stands didn't come through with the numbers. (Although to be fair they weren't entirely informed that we wanted to compare them.) To see how big a difference such good scouting can make is really inspirational, though.

[sforsancho]

That is definitely a very impressive strategic aid, and if it helped you like that I'm very interested in better definitions of the different columns, after nationals of course.

[Josh Fritsch]

Scouting is very important part of the game every year. Over the past 8 years I believe our team has come up with a very effective scouting method. On Thursdays/Fridays of the competition teams of students are have a set group of teams they are to be scouting. They are required to get pictures and also watch all of their practice/qualifying rounds. While they are watching they fill out papers with different questions based on their performance as well as overhead sheets showing the path of their auton. This way we can overlap the overheads to see if they made any changes to their auton during the day. Then they go down to the pits and ask the same questions that they filled out while watching the teams to the people on the team to see if the information provided matches what they saw on the field and also to get any information they missed. All of this information is then entered into a database that we have.

Before each of our rounds we have our head scouter bring us our "cheat sheets" on each of our partners as well as our opponents as well as a proposed strategy based on the teams in the match. The drive team then takes the sheets and goes to see our opponents robots to see some of the technical aspects of the robots that the scouts up in the stands my not see(i.e. 6 wheel drive-can we push them/push us etc...). Then based on all the information provided by our scouts and the drive team, the drive team then goes to talk with our partners with a proposed strategy, if everyone is in agreement then thats what we go with, if not we make changes as necessary to come up with the best plan possible.