Are any teams on CD tracking the Airship Pilot actions during a match? If not, why? My team has been pressuring me to have 2 scouts, one watching each Airship scout the pilot.
My concern and I assume not mine alone, but I cannot come up with a consistent way of scouting the pilots.
For example, a team member asked me if we could scout how many gears fall off the pegs during a match, assuming it was the Pilots fault. My response was something like the following: “There are many unknown factors, and factors outside of the Pilots control. Was the spring bent? Was the gear placed on far enough? Did the spring get hit while it was being pulled up, by another robot?”
Just curious to see if any teams have ways of scouting pilots, as we are preparing for championships. We would prefer quantitative data for the most part, but a consistent measure is a challenge, but so does qualitative data as well.
I don’t think there’s an easy way to scout pilots, mostly for the reasons you mentioned above. With that said, I think the easiest way to evaluate other pilots is to have your pilot “scout” them. From my experience (I’m a pilot), I can learn a lot about the other pilot before/during the match, and I’ve been able to gain insight on how “good” of a pilot they are. I would recommend asking your pilot after each match how their partner in the airship was, and I think you will gain valuable insight that way.
However, you will only be able to evaluate about 10 pilots this way, so you may have to come up with another way to scout the rest (maybe ask other pilots about pilots that stood out?).
As a final note, I think that it’s hard to “rank” the pilots because when the pilots become experienced enough, they all relatively do the same stuff. Pilots are a bit like kickers in football; they have a job that they perform over and over (getting the gears vs. kicking extra points), and they’re really only noticed when they mess up (drop a gear vs. miss an extra point). At one point or another, during a competition, most pilots will successfully lift up the gears 95% of the time, and at that point, distinguishing one from the other based on who’s better will be tricky. In short, I’m not completely sure if ranking the pilots is super useful (especially since the worst pilot on an alliance could be with the rest of the drive team at the drive stations while the other two are in the airship).
I believe that we just have a comment section for pilots. If they get a yellow card, drop a gear when it’s their fault, forget a rope, etc. we will take note.
1712 initially dedicated 2 scouters to subjectively watching pilots - one of the two we selected to do the job took the initiative to turn it into a more of an objective method, but it was originally intended to us to turn those two into just gurus we could ask about anything related to the pilots.
We have, however, moved away from that model, because we found the information gathered not useful. We now put it on the match scout’s plate to assess whether a dropped gear was pilot or robot failure and decide to whom to attribute the failure. Yellow cards from porthole violations etc. are simply subjective notes that get added like any other, and other pilot errors are caught by our scouts who don’t have a specific team to watch.
You never really understand how good a pilot is until you’re on the airship with them. Sure, you can count how many gears they drop and how many penalties they draw but pilot skill is more of their communication skills and time management skills. As a pilot, I would classify a “good pilot” as someone who is constantly talking and updating his/her co-pilot, something that is impossible to see from the stands.
I have a bag of highlighters and a notepad, only bots that perform and have a good pilot get the better color (or no color) , others get the warning colors… its certainly a metric (one that can be corrected on a three bot alliance in eliminations… might be able to slide a gear instead)…if we need quick info colors tell the story of that team… quickly.
Evaluating pilot skill and evaluating driver skill are the same in my book. You watch how efficiently they handle tasks, how they take risks, and what kinds of mistakes they make. Use those to give a subjective rating. I usually stick to “don’t want to play with”, “could work with”, and “excellent”.
I.E. If they’re pull a gear so fast it flies into a hopper, they’re done. If they pull the gear peg out of the channel a few times, they land in the middle. A pilot that can perfectly pull up that gear, tip back the peg on its last wheel, and drop it back down with confidence gets top marks.