How did your scouting work?

[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

[Bill Moore]

Originally Posted by EricH

I'm just curious to know, how good was your scouting work, and what was your approach?

MOE always has a serious scouting effort, and once again this year it was led by our own "Lord of the Dance", Bernie. Two other students, Rebecca and Morgan assisted in organizing the whole effort.

On Thursday, we would look at robots in the pits and during practice and fill out capability sheets, describing the different functions the robot could/could not perform.

On Friday and Saturday, we would fill out a match sheet for each robot in every match. It had a Field diagram at the top to trace autonomous moves and tetra placements. The section below was a checklist broken into 5 second intervals. Robots could "Collect" tetras at three locations -- Human, Auto Loader or Floor (scouts circled A, H or F in the checkbox). They could do 4 things with the tetras: 1) CONtain, 2) Cap, 3) Drop and 4) have it slide down their arm and Tangle on the bot (mark Con, or circle D or T). For capping, we recorded # of tetras placed on the goal (1 for most robots), the lowest tetra level capped (if 2 were already on goal, then the robot is capping the third level), and the specific goal ID that was capped (Goals were identified as A through I.)

We had additional checkboxes to indicate if the team was defended while capping, if they played defense (and against whom), and if they completed a row with their cap, stole a row with their cap or stole the opponents home row.

The final bit of information was when the team began to run for their "Home". Surprisingly some teams were heading home with 20 - 25 seconds remaining in a match. We also recorded penalties against the team if they were announced.

The one thing we wished to implement that we just did not have time for was to enter this in a spreadsheet/database for realtime analysis (like the Cheesey Poofs did).

Bernie, Rebecca and Morgan were able to take the forms we completed and put together a very good plan not only how to defeat our opponents, but how our own alliance could best complement each other. They were very instrumental in passng that information on to our competition team.

I have a PDF copy of our match sheet if anyone would like a copy of it, but it is over the 100k limit (114 or something like that). PM me if you would like to receive it.