Lack of passion in scouting

[FoleyEngineer]

One of our members came up with this system at Western, and we used it there and in the Championships to great effect...

Give each scout an equal list of teams (hopefully well under 10) and have them ONLY scout those teams. They can visit their pits (i.e. if they tip over or seem to break something), but basically they only need to watch the matches "their" teams are in.

When we get together at the end of the day for our "scouting results meeting", we create a "master" sheet of all the teams and then call out each robot's number. The person in charge of that robot gives us a 10 - 30 second "report" on them covering their offensive, defensive, autonomous and "bonus" features (i.e. ramps). They tell us if they're "tippy" or "drop a lot of tubes", etc. They really get to know each robot and have good "inside" info on them.

This works great as nobody is overburdened, and the info the scouts provide us goes beyond the basic stats. Say for example, a team scores two or three very quickly, and then goes on defense to prevent the other team from scoring. In the stats it might only show "two scored" but in reality they can score one every 15 seconds or so. Also we find out how well they do when defended vs. undefended which also doesn't usually show up in the basic stats.

Works for us!