Understaffed scouting

[josephus]

We have a relatively small team but would like to have an effective scouting group. How might we scout matches effectively with fewer than six people? I'm not worried about pit scouting, as that can be done by one or two people.
--josephus

[EricH]

Originally Posted by josephus

We have a relatively small team but would like to have an effective scouting group. How might we scout matches effectively with fewer than six people? I'm not worried about pit scouting, as that can be done by one or two people.
--josephus

Grab parents to assist to bring you up to six. Repeat for any siblings, mentors, or other random persons you bring with you.

Or partner with another team who does have such a system for an event or two. You get the data and learn one way to scout.

If both of those ideas fail...
I would suggest running a 2-person team, with a backup 2-person team at any given time. Each person scouts one side of the field; the backups double-check.

[New Lightning]

Originally Posted by EricH

Grab parents to assist to bring you up to six. Repeat for any siblings, mentors, or other random persons you bring with you.

Or partner with another team who does have such a system for an event or two. You get the data and learn one way to scout.

If both of those ideas fail...
I would suggest running a 2-person team, with a backup 2-person team at any given time. Each person scouts one side of the field; the backups double-check.

Ditto on this! There are some scouting systems out their, can't really name any of them off the top of my head, that are built for any number of users, find the one that works best for you. Also your best bet since you have so little is some electronic form of scouting. There are a couple of threads comparing the scouting apps I bet you find one that works for you.

[GKrotkov]

If nothing above works, then you could consider this reduction. I've never tried it, and I kind of just dreamed it up right now, but it might put you on the right track. It technically requires two people for the simplest form, but gets worthwhile with three.

Take a look at the scouting sheets being published for a single team and adapt them to a whole alliance. # of totes an alliance stacks, autonomous points for the whole alliance, total points of the whole alliance, litter thrown, etc. Then, you'd plug the data collected for one alliance into each robot on the alliance's individual sheet (in your data collection program), and get a very rough approximation. It's basically the same concept as OPR, but without calculation and being more specific than straight points. You wouldn't even need to make a system different from one for single robots, the data would just be bigger. You could see a general trend that "Oh, when team yyyy is on the field, the highest bin scored is generally higher." Like OPR, that trend might be totally off base, but you could see a trend and corroborate it with a "common sense check".

If you're not doing data entry, the drive team needs to come up to the stands and get the data themselves. You'll have to just stick everything in a binder, put the match schedule on front, and hope they can find what they're looking for. I can see some terrible times trying to deal with that at competition*. In other words, if you intend to do it this way, it looks like data entry will be almost essential.


* "Hey coach, let's go up to the binder and look through 100 matches to find some numbers on our two alliance partners for this last qualification match!" = Not Fun.

[Brandon Ha]

If you are seriously screwed and in a position with almost no members, you could have two people... One per side.

The kicker would be, No defensive Rating ))))

[pabeekm]

I've heard from lots of NC teams that they're in the same boat as you guys; they want to scout but would need to team up with someone to have enough people. I would suggest shooting Marie Hopper an email and asking her to send out to all NC teams asking if anyone wants to share scouts. There are likely several teams who would be interested. Good Luck!

[safiq10]

Last year what we did is we paired up on scouting and worked together with other teams. IT was a really unique experience and were able to use less members but still get valuable data from it.

[XaulZan11]

I would actually do something a little different than some of the suggestions already posted. If I only had only around three scouts, I wouldn't focus too much gathering data. I think scouting an entire alliance will lead to missing too much data (bad/incomplete data isn't very helpful) and scouting one robot per match will lead to extremely small sample sizes. I would rather have subjective data from several matches than knowing a team stacked 5 totes in the one match and no idea what they did in the other five.

Instead, I would focus on making sure watch your upcoming alliance partners (and opponents in other year) in their couple of matches before you are with/against them. Try to become experts on these teams first. Still be aware of what some of the other teams are doing, but your main goal in qualifications should be to win every match (or have the highest average). Then, if it is looking like you may finish the in top 8 (or be picked early), then start really scouting teams that compliment your strategy.

On the whole, I think too many FIRST teams put too much focus on gathering, organizing and displaying data and not as much as actually using the data and learning how robot gets those stats. Way too often I talk with other scouts that can read a report about a robots average in ten different stats, but can't tell you one thing about the actual robot. It is pretty amazing how much credibility you gain in pre-match strategy if you come up to a team and say "I like what you did your last match doing xyz. You scored x points, right?". So, in this respect, not having a huge scouting team is not as detrimental as it may seem.

[Kevin Leonard]

Inter-team scouting efforts can be not only a fantastic tool for gathering data, but also a great way to make new friends on other teams.

For the past few years, Team 20 has run our scouting program, The Constellation, with a number of teams at each of our events. In 2013, we had the opportunity to scout with Team 4265, the Wildbots, at both Archimedes and IRI.
Since then, 4265 has become one of our team's best friends in FRC, despite the fact that they live quite a large distance away from us.

If no teams in your area run a similar program, find another team in a similar situation as you and pair up with them for scouting. You could also go to a more experienced team in your area with an established scouting program and ask them for help. Most teams would be willing to give it a shot.

[j93785]

what do you mean by scouting apps? Has someone developed an application for scouting matches?

[Sam_Mills]

Siri put it right, whereas I lost track of the problem statement. How you scout should depend on your goals. In my time as a scout, the goal was to make a pick list, but if you are looking to get picked, a better goal may be to scout weaknesses in potential opponents (ex: finding what 2013 cyclers could not drive through the pyramid so you know how to play defence on them).

If you are in picking position however, I would be wary of using your gut for anything more than choosing between two candidates who are worth the same amount of points on paper, but maybe play differently.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard

I have to disagree with a few points here.
The problem with scouting under the assumption you won't be an alliance captain is that sometimes you still end up an alliance captain.
Every team should have a picklist going into Saturday morning, because a) they could end up an alliance captain, and b) they could get picked by a team with no pick list.

In my opinion and experience, quantitative scouting is almost always better than qualitative. That being said, if you're unable to put together the people in your team or through multiple teams to have a quantitative scouting group, qualitative is better than nothing (and is often a good supplement to hard data anyway.)

Please allow me to clarify: aiming for the realistic goal of being picked is not the same thing as assuming that you won't need your own pick list. Never assume you won't need your own list. At a 2008 off-season, I had to pick a guy because I could read the number on his shirt. (We made semifinals.) Always make a pick list.

But pick list strategy and scouting strategy are not necessarily the same. In the best case, you want them to be the same, but if that's not realistic it doesn't necessarily make sense to conflate them:
Pick List: Every team from 1st to nth should write a pick list: you might have to use it, and it's a necessary skill to acquire should you wish to improve. But make no mistake, a winning pick strategy is very, very difficult to make (speaking as someone who's done it both right and wrong before). Like everything, Captaining takes practice.
My Point: What my argument does mean is you shouldn't be surprised your list isn't as good as one backed by an experienced, comprehensive scouting system. It can't be. Your [used as a general pronoun] list would not have been as good as theirs even if you tried to mimic their system, because you're just not ready for it. In fact, it would almost certainly be much worse that you actual list. Because there is such as thing a bad/badly used quantitative data, and it shows up a lot in untrained scouting systems, whether or not it's identifiable at the time. So do what you're most capable of that's most (likely to be) useful to you.

Perhaps more importantly, remember that being picked and forming part of an alliance that you want--particularly at upper-tier events--is in fact an active and difficult job. It takes energy and practice, and you need to decide how to allocate those resources. Having been both there and in the "Hey, you're an alliance captain!" spot, I still won't let the fear of Captaining prematurely interfere with giving the team its best possible shot at peak performance. 1640's system is getting better at Captaining, but I've also had great 'gut' scouts that help me play our best in quals while "selling" the team for different alliance strategies. That's not to say that qualitative is necessarily best when you're understaffed, or that quantitative doesn't help you with qual strategy. You need to have people who are truly good at either for it to work. We've evolved through approaches that fit our skill sets and situations at the time. (Notably Einstein Finalists 2014, Einstein Semifinalists 2013, MAR Champions 2013, MAR Champions 2012. We also won Philly 2011 as 2nd Captain.) Don't mimic, emulate.


On a separate note, I do coach and select from the "gut" (or just not purely quantitatively) in other situations. Picking needs quantitative data, but there's a lot more to it than that: how do we play together, how do we work together, how do you think their crew will handle the pressure, and so on. That discussion might make for another interesting thread.

[EricH]

I would generally regard "gut" data as being a tiebreaker at best. Something like "Data says these two are about the same, which do I think will work better?"

[The other Gabe]

Originally Posted by j93785

what do you mean by scouting apps? Has someone developed an application for scouting matches?

multiple teams have done so. refer to this thread for what I suspect will be a partial list (with recommendations as to which are good)
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ing+the+app s

[Chowardie]

Originally Posted by New Lightning

Ditto on this! There are some scouting systems out their, can't really name any of them off the top of my head, that are built for any number of users, find the one that works best for you. Also your best bet since you have so little is some electronic form of scouting. There are a couple of threads comparing the scouting apps I bet you find one that works for you.

4473 Delta Prime Robotics, has also had problems recruiting scouts, for there was a lack of interest in the subject. We found that if you make it a competition between the scouts for correctness of scored matches, they would be able to work harder and longer.