We just wrapped up an awesome experience at the Week 1 Lake Superior Regional and we’re thinking forward to the Week 6 10000 Lakes Regional. I was directing scouting at LS and I have a few ideas for improving scouting.
We used little half-sheets with an outline of the field, and the six watchers in the stands drew arrows and wrote notes about how each robot performed. I was in the stands the entire time and watched every match. When we were forming alliance strategies after day 1 I found it hard to comment on how well a certain robot performed without seeing what it looked like. This led me to come up with a pit scouting solution that was image-based to supplement the match scouting.
Obviously it would be very difficult (but feasible) to put together a solid application of some form in four weeks that could satisfy my requirements, so my question is “Does anything like this already exist?”. I checked CD and I haven’t come across anything like it.
That being said, if anyone is interested in developing software solution to do something like this with me I’d be up for it. In my mind, feasibly, I would imagine a simple web interface that allows you to upload images gathered by cameras (not over WiFi of course) and tag them with searchable metadata. I don’t have much mobile dev experience but I can easily put something substantial together in Ruby on Rails. If you have an affinity for mobile development (with Bluetooth :D) we should definitely talk!