New System for Scouting?

[Starke]

Originally Posted by 340x4xLife

Matt Starke, a mentor with me on Team 340 is amazing at scouting and reads CD often. I'm sure once he sees this he will be happy to go over some ideas with you. Good luck in this endeavor and again welcome to FIRST!

I am honored to be known as such a person. Welcome to the scouting world of FIRST! Below, I have put together different posts from previous threads of what Justin is talking about. If you would like more information, let me know. This year, I am passing off the torch, for I will be away at college. I will continue to help out where I can. Know that I think about it, SparX is not that far away from Oswego! I wonder what Dylan thinks about that...

Originally Posted by Starke340

Being a first year mentor (student on the team in previous years), I was able to teach students how to scout effectively. The students and I made a very large excel spreadsheet. It is similar to Greg Needel's scouting spreadsheet, with some modifications to better fit what we needed. I brought my laptop to The Championship, where some students and I went around and asked questions and punched the answers in the laptop. The students and I also found pictures of most of the robots before The Championship started, and we stored them in the laptop as well. It was great to have everything in one small place. And it came in handy for the Einstein Field (ask 1126) .

Originally Posted by Dylan Gramlich

I must say i was quite shocked when you whipped out the laptop like a ninja and gave us the lowdown on the strategy to beat the newton alliance(which worked for one match but then they changed there strategy and we broke...). But the simple program you had on there looked quite helpful and easy to use.

Originally Posted by Starke340

I found this problem as well. The students an I came up with hyperlinking to each team page from a main page in the same document. On each team page, we also hyperlinked back to the main page. This took a lot of time to do, but it saved a lot of time in the end.

[Astronouth7303]

I think there are a lot of teams that would like to see a single, unified scouting system.

As a driver this year, here's what I cared about:

• Strategy used (What do they do? Score? Defend? etc.)
• How good they were (Do they actually do what they aim to do? How effective?)
• Any special abilities (eg, 111 is good at avoiding defense)

From a strategizing standpoint, we care about what they do, not the means by which they do it.

Having a centralized system could be greatly beneficial for teams. If data were collected from all the teams in a regional in a uniform manner, it is feasible that the data would be better than the data a single team could collect.

One idea is to borrow the "rating" system seen on many websites (YouTube, eBay, etc) and apply it to robots in various categories (like those mentioned above). If a significant number of teams participate, meaning there are significant numbers of contributers, you can start applying statistics to it.

The reason this works is the "wiki" principle, the wisdom of the masses. If you have a large number of people watch a match, and rank the robot on a scale (1-5, 1-10, 200-800, w/e), there tends to be a center, an average, of the ranking. (I read once that this happens at about 30 data points.) All that would be needed would be that for a match, you give a robot 5 or 6 ratings in different categories and submit it.

From discussions in IRC, there seems to be significant resistance to a collaborative scouting system amongst teams. (esp the successful ones.)

Does any of that make sense?

[Compnerd]

I personally like the idea, however a unified system might take away from the "spirit" of scouting, which is an important part for each team.

[rc616]

Personally, it seems odd enough to me that people share their scouting strategies (but I'm not saying bad, I'm willing to give my thoughts, in exchange for others) but I cannot imagine any "common" scouting system working. When it comes down to it, actuall scouting data is collected to help your team compete, and even if someone does create such a system, I have a feeling that successful teams will still rely on their own scouting.

Again, I don't oppose inter-team co-operation, but as long as we have robotics COMPETITIONS, there will always be some competive spirit.