One thing that would be good to ask since a picture does not make it apparent is “what defenses (if any) can you cross in autonomous?” This would allow you to prepare for collaboration in mutual qual matches, and prepare to pick defenses that they don’t cross for any matches you have against them. Again, no promise that they will tell you the truth, but it’s nice to have an idea anyways.
What I’ve found to be useful in pit scouting is asking what the team prefers, not what they can do. As many others have said, a team can’t be relied on to give accurate performance starts on their robot.
On the other hand, you can find important info on what their preffered role is. “Would you rather shoot or handle defenses” and “do you wish to focus on getting a breach or capture” gives you their preferences, which they won’t be wrong about. This can help a lot when looking for alliance partners.
This is the pit scouting questionnaire that my teams use. You can use it as well if you choose.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6z8teIpC75eZUplWEpfOUZGVHc/view?usp=sharing
sometimes robots can do certain things that they never get a chance to do (like when a portcullis is broken and nobody uses it, but its “gonna be fixed” for the last day, i.e. elim matches…)
Aye, There’s ↑ the rub!
I run pit scouting on our team. Our operations generally run like this:
On Day 0, I go around to every team’s pit and get pictures of their robots. These pictures then get uploaded to a Flickr account (from my phone if the Internet’s good enough, otherwise at home that night after the pits close). From there, the pictures get put onto spreadsheets which are printed and used to record pit scouting info, with each being for a different team and having their number and name on the spreadsheet.
On Day 1, I and typically at least one other pit scout divide up the teams and circle around the pits to ask questions. We have separate boxes for robot nickname, distinguishing characteristics, low/high goal shots, defense (against other robots), climbing, each of the various defenses, and goals and defenses in auto. Scouts aren’t given a script, but I generally ask questions in the following manner:
- Does your robot have a nickname?
- Which defenses can you do?
- Can you shoot high/low?
- What’s your drivetrain like? Are you good at pushing other robots around?
- Can you climb?
- What’s your auto like?
- Anything else cool or interesting about your robot?
From there, the forms stay in the pit so that they can be accessible to drive team. As drive team plays matches, they use a separate box to record interactions with their alliances drive teams, plus anything else unique they notice.
When we go to rank teams for desirability, we use the pit scouting forms to see if they potentially have any other valuable skills that they advertised, or if drive team has problems with them, or whether they have abilities which have not been demanded in their matches.
This data usually advises decisions secondarily as a means to cross-reference, but they also serve as excellent look at a team at glance if anyone picks up on something and wants to check over a team’s basic skills and robot image.
Your scouting shouldn’t rely on data you get from the pit since many teams exaggerate/lie, but it can be a useful addition to your scouting process.
here’s what my team has generally done:
[Click this link to seeee the sheet im talking about]](https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4buaELW8-5rOVNfRzZCYm9TV1E)
It is very specific information, but when asked in the right tones, the feedback is remarkable (yeses and no’s are still information, are they not?)
after the first day of pit scouting, we have a lot of down time, so we all (we = scouts) go around the pits and write down one interesting feature that is unique to the teams’ robots. If two teams share a feature, the one who works better trumps the other.
We also find our favorite bot in general and make predictions on who will be successful, who will not, based on the design aspects and performance on the practice field.
of course, prediction isnt everything… which is why we have match scouting!! the link to that stuff (which i made myseyuf) is [HERE]](https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4buaELW8-5rdFpFTC04d2doYjg) (in the case that anyone might want it…)
Not necessarily. There was a team at Midwest who’s bot was so close to the ground that their wheels weren’t even visible. At first glance, it seemed like they couldn’t do any defenses, and even the low bar seemed questionable with how low that thing was. However, they were somehow able to do the group Ds, as well as the low bar. We use the pit scouting data for the initial sort (i.e. “who can do the moat?”) then cross-reference that with actual crossing data. It just makes the whole process a bit faster.