How does your team scout?

[maverickfan138]

Moderators, if this topic is in the wrong forum, please move it.

The title is pretty straightforward. How does your team scout at competitions? Does your team have any special methods or equipment(like computer software) to aid in scouting? What kind of info does your team collect? Also, how is your info used to make your pick list?

This year, 573 was basically a mess. We scouted differently at every competition we attended. We always match scouted and pit scouted, but the ways we match scouted changed. In Ann Arbor, all we had were match sheets with criteria like points scored, which zones the bot played in, if they hung and were successful, extra comments, etc. This was decent, but we didn't feel that it was sufficient. At Troy, we added 'report cards'. Basically, we had similar criteria on the report cards(scoring, hanging, bump, tunnel, etc) to what was on the match scouting sheets, but instead of numbers and yes/no's, we marked down letter grades. The idea behind them seemed great. At MSC, we used the report cards more heavily, but soon found out that the report card system was flawed. There were teams who had D's and F's on the report cards, yet were placed high in rankings. In Atlanta, we decided to do away with the match scouting sheets and just take straight notes on robots. We filled out the report cards, but took them with a grain of salt. We were then reprimanded for our method and switched back to the match scouting sheets, but still took straight notes instead of numbers. Down in Atlanta, we discovered that the report cards were even more flawed that we previously thought.

I cannot speak on how we did our pick list in Ann Arbor and Troy, but at MSC we basically sorted our report cards into a pile with our first pick on top and our last pick on the bottom. In Atlanta, we made sure our photographer took photos of every robot and uploaded them to a computer. We started with a do not pick list by going through all 85 teams in Curie and determining by their robot whether we should consider them or not. We then started at the top of the list with the top 20 or so teams that stood out in our memory and in our notes. We then sorted a few more teams before coming up with our final pick list. We only had around a 30 team pick list and the rest were just stuck in there because our coach wanted an 85 team pick list. This last way seemed like it was the more effective and thorough, even though it was incomplete and it took a long time to make.

So there's 573's story. What about the rest of the FIRST world?