Last year, my team made a scouting app to keep track of team data during competition.
I was wondering how interested are teams in some sort of public version of this? As in an app where team could rally their data on a single database for everyone in competition to see and analyze.
That’s the key difference between many scouting apps out there. Instead of a local database, it is a public one.
Just as a side note, while competition doesn’t allow mobile data, technically we can use a little bit of it. Plus, the data can be encoded into text message to be processed to mimic the traditional local database.
I’m more than willing to convince my mentor and the programming team to make a public version of this if I see that other teams may be interested!
E301 doesn’t ban mobile data. It bans 802.11 [type list] wireless communication (access points, networks, etc), or to put it another way, WiFi.
Mobile data is transmitted over cellular networks, which are a different frequency. Even Bluetooth has been known to slide in as legal.
Of course, if you’re on the field, any enabled wireless electronic communication is out. But if you’re trying to scout from the driver station, “you’re doing it wrong” is a slight understatement.
I will say that I’m not entirely sure my team would be interested, but I can’t say they wouldn’t be either.
Really, that’s great news then! In competitions, they tell the audience to turn off data to not interfere with robot signals, which has always confused me since everyone sneakily uses it in some form. Now that you said it, maybe I had always interpret it wrong. Thanks for the insight!
A fair number of existing Scouting systems have proposed this “collaborative data” model, I think The Purple Warehouse by 1072 is probably the largest. They’ve been pretty successful, (I think) running it such that all data collected on their app is shared across all the teams using it.
While I definitely wouldn’t discourage you from launching another platform that encourages sharing data, I will say that good scouting provides a significant strategic advantage, both in terms of match strategy and alliance picking, and that’s why most established teams (with some exceptions) choose to keep their data private, even if they use another team’s scouting system.
Varying data quality is also another issue that can come up if anyone can publish, and that becomes problematic when you might only have ~10 data points per team. There are some interesting ways to avoid this problem with some statistics trickery given enough data (multiple datapoints per team per match), which is something we’re playing with for our system Lovat, but there’s no doubt that it’s incredibly hard to hold even your own team to a high standard of data accuracy, and this only gets harder with a collaborative model.
So essentially, yes, there are reasons why the public scouting database concept hasn’t been further expanded upon. That said, I think if it’s a project that interests you, there’s certainly more to try, and you should totally give it a shot.
Yeah, they’ll tell you to turn off wireless. Sometimes it’s particularly bad so they’ll ask for airplane mode instead. If someone is saying to turn off mobile data, that does effectively nothing except block the use of internet over cell phone networks… which puts people to WiFi again. Probably a translation issue somewhere.
Best way to put it: Field and robots are on WiFi. Cell phones work on WiFi or on cell phone networks, which can transmit in two broad categories (data and voice/text), depending on exactly what you’re doing with them. The field runs on WiFi only. When the announcement is made, it generally means that the field staff need WiFi channels to open up so the signals can get through. Mobile data is generally ignored as it’s on the cell network frequencies–if the call is to turn that off it generally means that there’s pretty bad wireless interference in general, which can have “other” causes as well.
I can’t say I’ve ever been at an event that called for mobile data to be turned off.
The WarriorBots #6421 have been promoting WarriorWATCH at some events. Rather than an app with multiple teams data, we make our scouting data available to everyone on a google sheet. We include some basic team look up info and the raw data. For the team that doesn’t have enough members to scout or is a rookie and doesn’t even know about scouting, it has been very well received.
I have a hard enough time managing my own bad data, fundamentally I question the value in handling other peoples bad data as well.
Tapping buttons or making tally marks is easy, doing that with near 100% accuracy is has been something that has been eluding teams for decades.
If you want public data the is useful the data collection scheme has to be really simple and I mean REALLY simple. Number of gamepieces scored is honestly too much for a lot of folks to enter with 100% accuracy. We are talking a level of simplicity like “Robot did something that was somewhat better than other robot”.
Yeah, I understand. I was aiming for a “public data collection system” than a “public dataset”. People have pointed out the flaws of maintaining the data quality from so many inputs, and I cannot agree more.
I’m still going to make it, but it will be similar to a “public dataset” like you mentioned with sources from several trusted allied teams.
This is my second year into the competition, so I admittingly have wild and improbable ideas, but I’m glad that this community has always helped tuned them down into more realistic ones.
We’ve used FIRES for years now. It’s great. You select which team’s scouting data to view. We always use ours, but will occasionally look at another team’s if we question our data from a particular match.
And shoutout to the developers @arbym . They are always open to feedback on the app.
Last year, we split scoring duties with a couple of other teams at our events. I think we got a bit of duplicate data, but it was nice to lower the load on everyone.
We are making data froum our scouting system, Viper, public for off-season events. For example see the stats we collected for alliance selection from the Battlecry at WPI event: EVENT Stats: FRC Scouting App
The system is free and open source. It can collect data either online when internet is available at a venue, or offline onto a battery powered server. https://viperscout.com/
This is because bluetooth is on 2.4Ghz, but the robot radios use 5Ghz (or 6Ghz for the new ones)
I’m no FTA and know all the ins and outs of bluetooth but I would advise against bluetooth, but yay for cellular, even though bluetooth should be legal since its 802.15.1 instead of 802.11
