Best Ways To Scout

[Fred Sayre]

Well, good luck to you and your team!

Scouting is very hard to do thoroughly (and quantitatively) without a good team of 6+ people. We plan on having 1 person on each robot keeping track of actions on the field, with 1 additional person taking notes on human players. This is done on paper sheets that get turned into someone entering the data into a database for analysis and informing our field team of upcoming matches and also for ranking if we make it into the top 8. Scouts get tired and need breaks of course, and usually we have to throw out the scouting data for matches that we play in (scouts are very distracted watching our machine!).

What I have done in years where we don't have a full team of scouts is cutting the process down to keep track of only teams you are playing with or against at that event. This usually means 0-3 robots per match which is much more manageable. If you are looking for alliance partners during eliminations, this is a bit harder and we would usually just have 1 person taking notes and ranking teams.

Another thought is to seek out another team at your event doing full scouting. Many teams (including ours) are more than willing to share their quantitative data with you. You can even offer to help sit in and scout with them.