How does your team scout?

[miniman]

Team 701 took a leaf out of team 100's book. We decided this year to base out scouting around the Nintendo DS system. We did this for a few reasons, the first being they are light weight and portable. They are readily available, day before we leave for competition we tell every one to bring their DS and charging cable (we try to end up with 7). Lastly the data is already digital data that doesn't need to be copied over from any kind of hand written sheet, just download and analyze.

In choosing what areas to scout we focused on purely empirical data. Stuff that isn't based on opinion. Things like scores, number of balls advanced, start area. No robot rating by the scouts, no opinions, just cold data.

The process we used was very simple, during prep/practice day pictures were taken of all the robots and the match list was digitized. Pictures and list were then saved to 6 individual SD cards along with the software written during build season. the SD cards were then inserted in the NDS (via special adapter) so that the software could run, and access the pictures and list. During a qualification match 6 scouts, each with a DS would each scout the specific robot that the DS was assigned (based on the match list). once all the data was collected and saved to the SD card it was transfered to a laptop, run through Microsoft access, analyzed, and manipulated to give rankings based on what our alliance requirements were.

Next year we are looking to overhaul our software, moving from C to C++. We are also hoping to take advantage of the wireless capabilities of the DS.

[Wildcat]

what i did:
pre-season: thought up systems and edited previous sheets as needed for any off season competitions. made up a scouting systm to integrate everyone into it with an equal amount of work, then used it @ kettering kick-off
build season: since there was so little to do i focused heavily on scouting. i spent hours on hours making sheets and presentations for my team on how the sheets should be filled out.
competition season: with the acception of kettering scouting was good on my team. i paired up vets and rookies so the rookies could learn how to do eveything. that worked for 2 out of 3 competitions. at the third one we had too few people to pair up so pairs were only done for pit scouting while match scouting was solo. Data gathering wise it was straight up pen and paper for the most part and at two of our competitions we had a video scouting system where we would record all of the matches for that competition to help fill in gaps where data was missing, in addition to that our videos made it to the Blue Alliance. An additional thing that was done by my scouting team was that we went out to the troy competition where we were not competing just for the purpose of scouting for states. Also a side note: if your scouting department wants to get on good terms with the rest of the team organize a pizza lunch @ competition, it was done on my team and was a big hit/
Off-seasn: i plan on devloping beta systems to test during off season and further develope for the next year.
If you specificly or any other team needs help with scouting feel free to approach the 862 scouting team at competition, we are usually sitting in the very front of the teams section or at the very top.