How did your scouting work?

[Cyberguy34000]

Scouting for our team was fairly last minute. To be honest, in the past we really haven't needed scouting because we usually either

a.) Make high seed and can pick whoever we want

b.) Are picked for finals because we've got a cool bot.

But this year, with the increased strategy and whatnot, we did put a scouting effort together, but it was fairly last minute. Both for regionals and nationals. So it ended up being 2-3 people doing all of the scouting.

At both regionals and nationals the philosophy going into scouting was that this was going to be only the most relevant information that the drive team could use on moments notice.

Don't know what other teams usually do with the info when it's compiled. For us, the drive team didn't really want scouting to hand a binder to them and look through all of it, but preferred that they have a scouting member on hand to give out information when they needed it in planning.

At regionals it was hastily written hand scribbled notes that were turned into a double sided sheet with sections for each team with Good: (transmission, low CG, crab drive, speed, traction, etc.) Bad: (KB wheels, Tipping, etc) and Strat: (goes for home row in first min.). Needless to say, transcribing took a good 4 hours or so, was a serious headache, and while it was useful, it could have been more organized. Picking alliance partners in finals was difficult because we got low seed, and it was hard to see, out of who was left, the overall quality of the bots remaining. We picked good alliance partners, but it could have been made a lot easier.

So at nationals we went the other way, 6 printed sheets (could have done 3 double-sided) with fill in the blank info. Pre-nat scouting got us the team # and names, and we would have had pictures if I hadn't counted on a free computer/printer at the hotel (doh). See thread. At least a few other teams found it useful.

The scouting sheet actually worked quite well, and information was quickly at hand whenever it was needed, the rate-it opinion bubbles worked very well, though it would have been useful to coordinate our scales beforehand

In hindsight the sheet worked pretty well but some things could have been eliminated and wouldn't have been missed. Knowing whether or not teams had treads or KB wheels didn't help a whole lot, and traction was very very difficult to actually gage. So that ended up being useless. Instead of a check list for Auto code, it should have been a fill-in line with each line being a different program. Auto code was very difficult to read. Should have added a strategy section along with good and bad, and replaced traction gage with CG because most bots ended up with medium center of gravity, of which many were on the high or low side.

Overall it turned out pretty good. And it gives us a lot of things to look out for next year. Preparing for next year, our scouting will probably be slimmed out even more, but for a first year effort, it turned out OK.

Now to plan for next season...

[Chris Fultz]

Ryan D leads this for 234, and someone has some tough shoes to fill for 2006.

The system was simple and effective. Paper sheets that told number of tetras, auto mode action, and a small space for notes. Before each match, Ryan would come down to our pit with the papers on our partners and opponents. It made making a strategy very easy. Whenwe were done, Ryan took tha papers back to contiue to add data.

I will also say that a good scouting system helps keep everyone 'honest' and the strategies more accurate. You can make a realistic plan based on how robots are really performing. For example, it does no good to make an alliance strategy based on a team saying they can score "4 every match" when you have data that shows it was only 1 or 2.

[sebas2mil]

well as far as 1251 goes we had friday and thursday as one of the major scouting days

we had 6 laptops and all connected to a switch that went and pulled the input page of our webbased program so we could input the data of the teams as the matches went on. so pretty much we had one person per robot on friday we communicated through the phone to the pits to pass the data so we could do a little strategy before the matches

on saturday we brought the laptpo back and forth to the matches with me and the little media oass so we could look at our oponets strenghts and weaknesses and same with our allies to form a good startegy


sebas

[Ethulin]

We used our freely available PHP based scouting app. We had 6 scouts, 4 from our team, 2 from 694. It worked out ok, we had such a horrible view, so we missed some stuff.

I feel pretty bad though, on the day of the eliminations I tried to find some one from 694. I looked for a while, went to their pit, but was still not able to find them.

Well I finally found them. Sadly it was when we were up against them! I offered to set up an adhoc right then, but they said don't bother, if we beat you then you can. Well we beat them, and I am still pretty pissed off, because I know I would not be happy if my team put work into something and was unable to reap the rewards.

But for our alliance was our scouting data was VERY helpfully. We were the 8th alliance, 2nd pick, so normally a team in that situation does not have much of a say, but we showed them our scouting data and they were very interested, so we did allot of strategy organizing.

Well 8th seed alliance got devision finalists! so I guess it paid off.

Shout out to 1108 and 447, two $@#$@#$@#$@# good alliance partners, quite to upset to go from 8th seed to devision finalists.

[Not2B]

Our scouting was AMAZING this year. Go Julie for running it all. First year our scouting really was useful.

Low tech - best way to go.

Each team had a sheet. First, look at them in the pits. Then, for each match they played, the sheet would come out, and observations would be recorded.

But here was the key... shortly before each of our matches the head scouter would review all data for each team in the match. It would go onto a summary sheet, and a runner would take it down to the drive team. There, the drive team and alliances would be able to review the op-force info, as well as what our partners REALLY could do. (How many times has a team "embeleshed" their skills??)

I credit our scouters for many of our best matches. We knew EXACTLY who to interfere with, and when our alliance stacking would be faster than the other team. (Yes... I mean time... average time per tetra was important to us.)

Julie said she was going to explain our scouting in a white paper this summer, because we thought is was good and unique. And it should be good no matter the game or year.

[Joe J.]

Yeah our scouting rocked. As the driver I can say they helped us win our matches. The summery sheets were great seeing as we had time to talk to our alliance partners (robot never broke down) we got a lot of planning in before each match. What was also nice was we had review sheets of each of our matches ya know what actually happened those of us on the drive team could get a full picture of what we did right and wrong in each match.

[EricH]

One trick we did was to go around on Thursday and either talk to the teams or get a picture of every robot (a tedious process). When we had that info, we could compare it (somewhat) to the records on Friday to see if a team was using hyperbole in describing what they could do. Our scouting worked really well during both regionals we went to and nationals. It morphed a bit, but remained mostly the same as when I put it together during build.

[rufu5]

We ( 447 ) set up a wireless ad hoc laptop network and had a set of pit scouts compile data on practice day, and then input match data thought the qp matches. Needless to say with only 3 people scouting there were a LOT of holes and a lot of scouted matches left un entered into the database but it was our first time using a laptop system and it was still very useful.

i would defiantly say that 492 scouting system was the best Ive seen so far (rivaling 461 's at the boiler maker regional)

Originally Posted by Ethulin

We used our freely available PHP based scouting app.

i would love if you could post a link here, or send me the prog asimovchess@yahoo.com and i can host it on my teams website because it was mega awesome