A New Way to Scout

[khanh111]

As any scout knows, data is king. More data is better (as long as you can analyze it). What I wanted to discuss in this post were the methods we use for competitive analysis. (I actually gave a presentation on this recently - the slides are linked at the bottom).

As far as I have seen, there are five methods of scouting:
1. Paper
2. Spreadsheet
3. Tablet/Web/Phone Application
4. Databases (supplementary - The Blue Alliance, CheesyScout, CowScout, etc.)
5. Crowdscouting

Each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses. What I specifically wanted to talk about was crowdscouting. Crowdscouting would be a way for multiple teams that go to different events to contribute to the same dataset, which would be accessible by all members of the crowdscouting alliance (and publicly released after the season). It hasn't been used on any large level (that I know of), so there's a lot of potential for expansion here.




Why?
There are two problems that we will face in the upcoming years:

1. More data in less time - As FIRST grows, and we see more events (nationwide districts by 2017) and more teams, we'll be interacting with more teams at more events. We'll have less time to know each team's strengths and weaknesses, and to notice changes between each event (a team that does horribly at their first event could improve multifold by their second event).

2. Competition will increase - This was a major factor behind the change to districts. In the words of one of the planners of the district system, "Michigan is able to put out so many competitive robots because they have more events." Scouting capabilities will need to increase with competition.




Crowdscouting Discussion
I wanted to start a discussion on what guidelines and practices we could use to create crowdscouting systems. I've thought of a few myself:

1. Involved teams would need to decide what to keep track of early in the season. This could be done via email or a Hangout or Skype. They would need to decide on a method to collect data as well. Do they want an API to be able to collect realtime data?

2. Quantitative data only - this means things like types of drivetrains, autonomous points scored, etc. We don't want qualitative data because different teams want to track different things in different ways. There would be too much confusion based on judging data quality. Hard data can't be argued with. Teams would be free to collect their own qualitative data.

3. I'm having trouble imagining this with using an app. Data is only as helpful as how quickly you can gain access to it. On 1540, we use tablets with data connectivity to access the internet (because wifi can mess with the Field Management System). Our scout data is immediately accessible to the drive coach, who can then use data to plan our matches.

How many other teams do this? If there were enough, it would be simple to make an API to send data directly to a central server, and have any team able to access it immediately.




I'm already developing a crowdscouting API for this.

I look forward to the discussion.
-Hamzah

If you are interested in working with me on this, please contact me:
Email: khanh@catlin.edu
Twitter: @JSandrobots1540


Slides - http://static.squarespace.com/static...esentation.pdf