Just wondering how many people are actively scouting & filling out data at your events on your team.
Do you have one person scouting per team for a total of 6 people?
Do you have one per Robot & one per Payload Specialist for a total of 12 people?
More people scouting?
Less people scouting?
If you have less than the 12 or 6 people for reasons mentioned above, what are you focusing on while scouting?
Just wondering.
The reason I’m asking is because I’m working on developing an effective scouting system (in theory) to have less than the 12 people scouting a match (which we think is the ideal number of people scouting each match) since we just don’t have that many people available this year.
I would imagine this answer is subjective highly subjective on what you are looking for in a partner and what you think your strong and weak points of your robot.
If you widdle your criteria down and you are looking for some very specific things I have been part of teams that have effectively scouted a regional with 2-3 people.
We usually had 13 people scouting with up to 7 laptops, but then again, the people did come from 3 or 4 different teams at Buckeye (1 person and 1 laptop was the compiling laptop). Teams involved included 461, 829, 1646, and 1747.
1519 had 11 people. One entered info. from our scouting sheets onto a laptop, one filled an index cards with information for our drive team for their next match, one handed out the sheets and organized everyone. 2-3 scouted human players while 6 scouted bots. And their were several others who switched out to give others breaks.
We tried having 2 people scout each team during a match. One would follow the HP and one would follow the Robot. We found this worked pretty well and they gathered a lot of good and Useful info. We probably could’ve gotten decent results with 1 scout per team but they probably would’ve focused on the Robot.
Team 234 uses 15 students to scout. 6 watch HPs and keep track of shots made vs. shots attempted on paper. 6 track robots and trailers on PDAs linked via bluetooth to a laptop. 1 student keeps the HP papers organized. 2 students work with a laptop to compile all of the data, as well as watching the matches from a “wholistic” view.
When everything is done we have pretty good data on every team including robot shots made vs. shots attempted, HP shots made vs. shots attempted, average balls in own trailer, as well as some “subjective” data on each robot.
I think we are going to go with 1 per robot and 1 specifically taking notes on all human players. It is hard enough to always know the number of the robots and identifying the human players is going to be harder I imagine. The human player data will be important, but secondary to robot performance I think. How many teams switch their human players during an event?
We are scouting with 12 per match…
We share our data with any teams that want to look at it or use it.
We would love to have some other teams help us gather it…
If anyone is interested in helping out… please let us know
We will be in Portland and Seattle…
Just look for Team 1983 (The Skunkworks…)
You can’t miss us…
We would love to make friends and we could sure use some help…
Even if you don’t help you can share in the data gathered. Just stop by our systems integration group in the stands… and we can give you what you need.
Enough to make it noticeable. We noticed a few teams that had highly variable human player performance. When we checked our pit scouting sheets, sure enough they switched out human players.
Wow it must be great to have enough people on your team to do this. We didn’t have anyone on our team exclusively assigned to scouting at our last regional but Da Bears were gracious enough to help us out with that! Their scout knew something about every team/robot attending.
Either 6 (one per team) or 7 (one per team plus one compiling data).
I hate to link you elsewhere, but I have a pretty good description of what our team scouts for, with examples, on our team forums. It took a while to type up, so you can find it here. There’s also a bit of discussion about a weighted ranking system below the main post on what to scout for and how to record it.
I want to have 12 people scouting from our team, but we’re too few (20 members overall, 4 of them Drive Team, 6 Pit members, which leaves us with 10 people to scout).
Our mentors want us to be 6 people, saying scouting the PS isn’t important since teams can change their PSs (which is true) and there’s not too much strategy to think or counter when it comes to the PS. I say other.
They say we don’t have the members, and I agree, and I sugested to have some help from another team by having a collaberated scouting system and work together.
It has some of its disatvantages (They know what we know) and advantages (you can have enough people to do rotations between the people responsible for scouting so people don’t get tired watching games for 6 hours straight) and my team seems to be too suspicious.
So for now, we’re 6. Hope we’ll be able to get a good enough strategy from robot info only.
At Buckeye, we had a scouting collaboration between four teams (461, 829, 1646, 1747). One person printed projected match sheets for all the teams from a database laptop, and twelve other people worked with six laptops (half scouting human players, half scouting robots). The laptops each scouted using a 21 Kb Excel sheet, and these were transferred via Filezilla to a folder on the database computer. For Boilermaker, we are adding several more teams to the scouting collaboration, so we’re probably going to add an extra person to each laptop (scouting the trailer).
But what about the teams (such as ourselves) who have a specialized human player (high shooting percentage) and a strategy based around getting our HP super cells. I think finding a consistently good HP could be vital to strategy in elimination matches. Even more so if they are paired up with a robot that can deliver them 2 empty cells.
