What are you guys looking for when scouting out other teams pits? This is both for use in making my teams pit scouting sheet and for marketing our own bot when other scouts come around.
Thanks,
2067 Apple Pi Robotics
Minibots will be huge; look for consistent deployment systems, a universal deployment technique, and a fast minibot (preferably so you can get a fast minibot on a consistent deployment mechanism).
Find out about their role in-game (Feeder, Defense, Offense) and what their capable of offensively and defensively.
Ask about their drive system but don’t use that as a decider; some mecanums will be dominant, some will be not that great (usually comes down to driver experience), and don’t auto-bench 6-WD scorers, they can be as good or better than some mecs.
Stepping outside of simple go-up-and-ask-them idea, keep an eye on matches of potential partners, it will tell you significantly more about a robot and their drivers + Human Players than Pit Scouting will.
My experience is that other than grabbing a photo of each robot, pit scouting is entirely useless (and sometimes annoying for teams just trying to get some work done).
What parts a robot has on it or what a team says it can do often has no resemblence to what it actually does on the field. For scouting, my recommendation is that your time is better spent in the stands, watching what the robots actually do, as opposed to listening to the builders talk about what they’re supposed to do.
How reliable a teams robot/scoring mechanism/minibot/critical component is?
The less time a team spends on fixing components, the better they’ll perform in both Elim’s & Qual’s. You may not need to ask at times, as you MAY be able to tell from the team’s match performance, but it’s always good to hear from someone who knows their teams robot about why it failed in a match rather than your scouts just saying “it didn’t work/failed”.
Agreed. There were times when our robot stopped driving because we didn’t use a locknut where we should’ve. I don’t know if this impacted scouting for other teams (It was on Saturday morning, a time we weight heavily for changes in robots), but nobody came up to us and asked us why our robot broke. We were a purely defensive robot (since our stupid kicker just gave up on us!), and were one of the fastest robots out there.
As far as pit scouting goes, most teams will tell you what the robot does, especially as it gets closer to Elims, rather than what it can’t do. Don’t use pit scouting as your basis for choosing your alliance, but rather back up your stand scouters’ data with Teams’ Drive Teams reference points.
Not to derail this thread too much, but, as I see it, the optimal alliance is 2 offensive/1 defensive. This will be especially true this year, as two robots attempting to place on the same scoring grid will be messy. The “defensive” robot could either block robots, tubes (!), or ferry tubes out to the scorers.
Whenever I do pit scouting it seems like teams (maybe unconsciously) tend to exaggerate their robots abilities. (Anyone reading this I promise you that pit scouting had no impact on alliance selection, ever.)
The two types of data that I found could be gathered during pit scouting was my observations about their robot (eg: wheel type, # of wheels, cleanliness of wires, first impressions, ect) and info about autonomous mode (eg: you like to start in XYZ zone and do ZYX and can do it ABC% of the time). Everything else was either relative, subject to exaggeration, or just unreliable.
Use pit scouting to gather information on the physical design of the robot, and snap a picture of every bot to reference later on.
Ask teams questions about there design choices, reliability, scoring capacity, autonomous and then watch the matches to see check for agreement. See what there team might be like to work with, and keep notes on attitudes as well.
Pit scouting can tell you alot about a robot, but watching matches tells you more.
I will have to agree here. Pit scouting can be very annoying and waste of time for both parties. But if you choose to pit scout, please don’t ask “what kind of drive is it”. “Is it a elevator or pivot arm” “can you guys all get out of the pits so we can get a clean picture”. Use your eyes. Ask questions that are intelligent and useful to a scouting system. Often teams are in pit repair mode and thats not the time to bother people.
Just my $0.02
Pit scouting can serve several purposes:
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Understand what a team MAY do in the match with/against you.
Its always best to “prepare for the worst”. Just because a team didnt have an auto mode or minibot in the last 3 matches, doesnt mean they aren’t working on it and will come out strong against you. Know what they are working on/plan to do. -
Compare what they “say they can do” to what they “really do”
You can gauge how honest a team is by what they “say” they can do, versus what you actually observe in matches. This helps you know in general how much to “trust” them when you are paired up with them in a match. Granted, you have to give a little relief for that the person in the pit answering your questions may not be the most knowledgeable person, or might be overly optimistic, but it can be a good gauge. -
Get your students familiar with other designs!!
Our pit scouting often involves questions about drivetrains and speed of arms, types of wheels, etc. Its good to get some of your newer kids out there reviewing and understanding other team’s robot designs. -
Understanding their Drive Team
We havent done much of this in the past, but this year, with the flip-flop role of the Feeder/Analyst and the fact that some teams will be relying on this person to communicate with the Feeders, its worth a quick question or two to know what your potential partners will need/expect.
And there are others, but I agree with several of the posts here… match scouting is THE most important data point, but pit scouting can have a lot of value in the sense of the items I have listed above. If you have the personnel resources, definitely go for it. There will be several teams that dont make it to practice on Thursday, so its worth at least knowing what they “might” do if you have to strategize with/against them.
Pit scouting does have very little bearing on our alliance selection. By the time we get to that, we have enough match data to make most of our decisions. Occasionally if we cannot see it in a picture, we will refer to our pit sheets to see what kind of drivetrain or other details. We also often compare their “honesty” with their match performance, and may need some of the drive team data to know if we “could” work well with them.
For those of you that think pit scouters are wasting your time… I really wonder whether you “get it”, especially in regards to my point #3. This can be a chance to share your design with other teams & students, teams with less experience, or teams that may not have “thought of that”. You’d be surprised how much Inspiration can come from the pits…
Lots of times pit scouting seems to be assigned to students who have nothing else to do and have no idea about how a robot works.
Our robot last year had a welded frame that was 5 feet tall and designed to catch and re-cycle the balls back from the tower.
The best part of the season was when the pit scouters would ask “Can you go under the tunnel?”.
We usually told them “yes”. We figured that if we really wanted to, we could hit the tunnel fast enough to tear off the top 4 feet of the robot and go through it …
One thing I’ve thought about doing is giving driveteams a rules and strategy quiz. Questions would include some basic rule questions (Can you…without penalty?) and some strategy questions (if the other alliance does…what do you do?). Basically to see if they know the rules and if they have a decent handle on strategies. Depending on the depth of regionals, some times you just want a 3rd partner that won’t break down or commit penalties. This would one way to measure if they know the rules.
I still prefer “How good are you at scoring?”. How are you supposed to answer?
“Yes.”
You know, I still have data on the time your robot wasn’t working…your last match, it looks like?..nothing like ‘ded’ scrawled on a scout’s reporting sheet 
But I sympathize. It’s always sad when the robot is dead throughout the match because of a loose wire…I remember running around after that match last year, telling other teams that yes, we’re fine, we just had a loose wire! And we were ranked #1 earlier today!
Speaking of which…does anyone count, at all, on the ‘official’ reported rankings? We don’t use them much, except when we’re ranked high and want to broadcast and/or record the fact. I guess they might be useful as a predictor of top-seeded teams.
Regarding pit scouting: we’ve always had a small scouting team and so we focus on match scouting [although I favor spending my lunch pit-scouting]. If we have enough people this year, we may do some this year though.
I appreciated the suggestions in this thread to ask about a team’s strategy, that will figure in. I’ve never seen the need to ask about a team’s drivetrain, personally.
I’d like to know at which level they prefer to hang game pieces. That could be recorded in match-scouting, but it would be very helpful to know before a game [particularly for partners].
Can their tube-manipulator pick up game pieces off the ground? At one point we considered only receiving tubes from a human player [we scratched that idea, fortunately]. If the Week 0 event we attended was any judge, it will be far faster to pick tubes up off the ground than from a human player.
Personally, I don’t think feeder robots will be big this year, because it IS just so easy for a human player to throw a game piece out onto the field. Of course, our Week 0 event was not very competitive and the human players just chucked all their game pieces onto the field and then watched the matches…so there may be more of a shortage of game pieces in competition. I guess we’ll know this weekend 
To get a bit off-topic…defense is important, especially in this game with the above-mentioned small scoring area. Any ideas on an objective way to rank defensive teams? little.goetz, our scouting report on your team from last year only indicates the number of balls scored and the fact that your robot was dead in one match. This is because I’ve always found it hard to qualify defensive robots [Oh that team just scored a point, that one didn’t, guess who gets noticed?]. If we’d been able to notice and record that you guys were good at defense, it would have been better for all concerned. With a larger team, I have high hopes this year…do you guys rely on number of game pieces blocked, for example, or some more-subjective rating, such as a 1-5 scale?
For pit scouting, I’ve personally found that it is often better to ask questions about what a team can do, not how well they can do it. For example, last year, “Can you go over a bump or under the tunnel?” and “Do you have a possession mechanism?” Typically a team won’t lie about what they can do. Although most will exaggerate about how well they can do it. This helps your team a lot more because if I team said no to both of the aforementioned questions, I probably would take them off a pick list, unless there was a strong reason why I should keep them.
Again, this is not the most important scouting, but it can make your life easier during a scouting meeting if you can just automatically take off 25% teams from your list because they can not complete the game functions that you require on an alliance.
I definitely agree with this. Pit scouting, in my opinion, is not the most helpful. I have always found that watching matches and analyzing those makes the most sense. But as previously stated, asking questions in the pit about what was observed on the field is helpful.
Just my two cents.