Scouting Ideas and Strategies

[Vin211]

Hey Everyone,


It is that time of year again and I'm back into the swing of things after a nice long vacation ha-ha. Anywho, if anyone would like to discuss any scouting techniques that would be awesome. I have been doing it for quite a while. I may even be able to help one lucky team at the national event. I specialize in photography and scouting / scouting training.

[EricH]

Try the Scouting forum. (Though I would guess that this thread will end up there before too long.)

[Madison]

Originally Posted by EricH

Try the Scouting forum. (Though I would guess that this thread will end up there before too long.)

Was that fast enough?

[Shu Song]

TWO MINUTES???? wow, kudos to the mods, they moved this thread with 2 minutes.

Anyway... scouting. I know there are a lot of software out by other teams for scouting. Depending on what regionals you go to, some teams also set up a scouting database for all teams to use over a WLAN, so any laptop with wireless can access it.

If you are not into all that technology, good-old paper and pencil will work just as well. Make you have scouts who not only get the basic specs of the bot, but also other things that aren't so objective. When it comes down to alliance selection or strategizing, the more subjective aspects of a team can become a lot more important than the acutal numbers.

[Conor Ryan]

Originally Posted by Shu Song

TWO MINUTES???? wow, kudos to the mods, they moved this thread with 2 minutes.

Anyway... scouting. I know there are a lot of software out by other teams for scouting. Depending on what regionals you go to, some teams also set up a scouting database for all teams to use over a WLAN, so any laptop with wireless can access it.

If you are not into all that technology, good-old paper and pencil will work just as well. Make you have scouts who not only get the basic specs of the bot, but also other things that aren't so objective. When it comes down to alliance selection or strategizing, the more subjective aspects of a team can become a lot more important than the acutal numbers.

Yeap, one of those programs Shu is talking about is called, FIRST Scouting Network.

Pretty much what it's gonna have is a database of teams and match data collected by volunteers at regionals and eventually the championship. Anyone can get involved with it at this point, check http://www.firstscouting.net/forum/ if your intrested. And watch in the coming weeks for more specifics on how the program is going to work. (Pretty much it'll have two sections, a Robot Scouting Form saying what kind of mechanisms a robot uses and how the robot works, and the second section is match data, people will report on how each robot does in a match (scores center, gets ramp bonus, plays defence well, corners ect.) all this information will go into a database and anyone can view it.

[Kevin_547]

if u did shoot balls and gather the balls first in a hopper like structure how would u manage getting the balls from the hopper into your shooter without over loading ur shooter???

[themagic8ball]

I wrote my own program for my team for scouting. It gets about as detailed as it gets, far more detailed than STAMP for each team. Unfortunately I do not have plans of releasing it for use at this time.

[Ethulin]

I recomend you try out STAMP. You can get more info on this thread. But as people have said it may just not be your cup of tea. If FSN gets a release out soon then I suggest you check that out as well.

[Cyberguy34000]

There's always the good ol' pen and paper method as well. It's much more reliable than all of these newfangled technological thing-a-majigs.

It helps if you think of what information is really important to your team beforehand so you know what to scout for.