TOO much scouting info???

[Bill Moore]

Originally Posted by cbolin

Hi,
Is it possible to collect TOO much information about robots and their teams?

Have you applied any 'data reduction' processes after a regional to determine what was truly important?

Is it possible to collect too much information? Yes, but if you have an effective scouting strategy, you will identify the extraneous information during/after your regional competition and eliminate it. The scouting process should adapt as you proceed through your competitions. It should become more streamlined to record and focused on those characteristics that are important.

You may have identified two points that are important to your competition team, but there are many more points to consider if you are one of the alliance captains picking partners. "How our robot plays with/against yours" is not the same as "Which of these equally capable bots would best fit in our alliance?" That's where some of the finer details of scouting come into play. The top few bots in the division will be easy to pick out -- how do you plan to distinguish between the 18 to 20 next most capable bots when you work off two datapoints?

I always find it amazing that teams send their alliance captains down to the field unprepared. If the 8th Alliance captain doesn't have 24 names on their list (or 23 if they don't include themselves), then their scout/strategy teams have let them down. Yet every competition you see captains looking up into the stands trying to guess what their team is telling them. This means (since the top seeds can pick each other) that teams seeded down through 15th, could be picking, and should be prepared to do so with a list of 24 names.

Folks, I don't care if you placed in the top 8 after qualifying rounds, or if you were bumped there because of other alliance picks, YOUR TEAM BELONGS THERE BECAUSE OF THE GREAT AND CAPABLE GAMEPLAY YOUR ROBOT AND COMPETITION TEAM DISPLAYED. Don't arrive unprepared to put together a division winning alliance, but be thoroughly prepared to put together the best one you can to get every spectator in the audience on the edges of their seats.

Win, Lose or Tie, but do it in a way that FIRSTers will be talking about for years to come!