Muti-Team Scouting System at Midwest

[Emil]

Originally Posted by psquared89

...I know that my team is willing to send out some volunteers, just tell us what exactly you need.

We simpley need people to scout and enter data. We will be scouting all 3 days of the competition so we are in need of people at any and all times.

If you are a pit scout, you will need to have had previous FIRST experience and preferably be somewhat knowledgable in tech stuff directly relating to robots. Pit scouts will ask other teams questions and be expected to understand this information well enough to write a good pit scouting report on the team.

If you are a photo scout, you will need to know how to use a digital camera. Basically anyone can do photo scouting. Such a person would be assigned a list of teams they need to go and take photos of.

If you are a field scout, you will need to understand how the game works. You will need to, for example, know which loading station is the manual one and which one is the automatic one. You will also need to be able to judge weather a robot is fast/slow and weather it is powerful/weak. Most of the people involved with scouting will be field scouts due to the ammount of information needing to be gathered from every match. After watching a few games, even some of the rookies can do field scouting.

If you are entering data, you will need to be able to type at a reasonable rate. You will be entering the the pit scouting and field scouting sheets into the computer.

Those are just some summeries to give you an idea about what kind of things people will be doing.

Just a side note: Team 1646 helped us out in the Boilermaker regional with data entry and they had no problems with our system.

Another thing that I should have mentioned: We try to rotate people as often as possible. The more people that participate, the the less time each individual scout will have to spend scouting. Competitions are also suppose to be fun and scouting can get quite irritating if you do it for a while. This is why we would like to have as many people as possible and rotate them.

Originally Posted by psquared89

...A few things on our scouting sheets that I did not see on yours...

ARM:
Electric/Pneumatic?
# of Tiers/Joints?
Max Height? (in ft, in 'how many tetras max on side', and in 'max on center')

MANIPULATOR:
Passive/Active?
How accurately does is pick up a tetra? (# of tries)
How accurately does is place a tetra? (# of tires)

Also, your autonomous section only highlights the fact that there is an autonomous mode, not what it does. One of the strongest pieces of our Detriot alliance was winning our entire home row in autonomous mode, it made life considerably easier.

I will account for these fields in the database system and scouting sheets. Our scouting information may appear to be lacking but the point of it is to be short, informative, and straight to the point. I feel that a lot of teams are "overscouting" in some sense because they collect information that they never really use. This is why our scouting fields are relatively short. Also another thing to keep in mind is that the field scouts only have 2 mins to record everything that happened during a match and if you overburden them with lots and lots of fields, they will not be able to provide quality information. Anyways that's just some of our theory. Thanks for those suggestions, and I will actually add them to the system.

Originally Posted by psquared89

Please don't take these comments negatively, they are only meant to be constructive critism, our team and I'm sure all the other teams at GLR appreciate what you're doing.

No way I take it negatively. I love criticism - it helps me improve.


If you have any further questions you can post here or even contact me on AIM/MSN by using Chief's icons next to my username.

Thanks a lot guys, we are honored that you will join us.