This has been the best year that our team has ever seen, the level of leadership and teamwork that I’ve witnessed has been simply amazing. Our student designed and built robot was finished ahead of schedule, it went on to the semifinals at the Denver Regional this weekend, two of our mentors were given awards (Woodie Flowers, Regional Volunteer), and our team won the Xerox Creativity award. So put in short, things have gone incredibly well this season.
As far as scouting, that also went incredibly well, and while the memories of competition are still fresh in my mind, I’m writing these things down as a guide for other teams. We’ve put in a lot of work and thought into our scouting, and it would be wonderful if other teams can learn from our successes and mistakes. Feel free to contact me if you need help or advice with your scouting endeavors. So without further adieu, here is a review of how our scouting went this year.
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** What Went Right…**
** People**
We had a small group of 2-3 highly dedicated members exclusively doing scouting and strategy. Each person worked their hardest and our small size allowed us to move quickly. While it is possible to force people to scout, I’ve learned that the best work comes from a small group of people that are passionate about what they do. And the passion that our scouts showed incredible. I’d like to especially thank Mark, who’s hard work and dedication made this thing possible. I know he’ll make a great leader when he takes over scouting over next year.
** Location**
FIRST was quite kind to the scouts this year, they set aside an official Scouting Station! It was essentially two tables with power strips and a good view of the field, but it was great being able to talk to the scouts from other teams and compare information. Being on the travel level also allowed very quick runs back and forth between the pits.
** Equipment**
Printer, camera, laptop, software, scoutbooks… We were prepared for competition. Until you’ve tried it for yourself, you cannot realize how wonderful it is having a digital copy of all your information ready to modify and print off within minutes. While I mainly did scouting and strategy in the pits, writing down information in the scoutbook and taking pictures, Mark and Kevin were up at the Scouting Station with the laptop watching matches and typing out team info and match breakdowns. Which bring to me to my next point…
** Match Breakdowns**
I cannot recommend these highly enough. Once you start doing these, you cannot live without them. The way they empower you to stratigize for games is unmatched. They are the culmination of all our scouting work, and are the most important thing that we were able to do. For every match, our drivers and alliance partners were given a Match Breakdown, giant photos of the six robots competing and next to them, their strengths and weaknesses clearly spelled out. No longer were there comments of “which team was that? Fifteen forty who? Who the heck is that? Oh, wait I’m thinking of another team. I thought ____ was the defensive bot and team ____ was the ramp? Did I get that backwards? Who are our partners again?” Those comments just didn’t happen, because seeing the teams clearly pictured and summarized allowed us to cut through the confusion that has plagued our strategy sessions in the past. I cannot recommend creating these highly enough.
If your team wishes to create Match Breakdowns, you’ll need to have the previous three things I mentioned, 2-3 highly dedicated people (this is impossible for one person), a good location, and all of the equipment I mentioned earlier. A color printer to print out the information and photos, a camera (any information you collect is meaningless if your drivers are confused about which robot you are talking about, take photos!), a laptop to organize and store the information (battery power is a good thing), software (PIXResizer, OpenOffice, (DON’T USE MICROSOFT WORD TABLES! Use text boxes or frames and avoid unspeakable formatting horrors (shudder))) and scoutbooks to take down the paper version of the information (which will later be transcribed to the laptop). The way our team did it, we could make a Match Breakdown from request to printout in about 10 minutes. If your team does any scouting at all, just having photos of the six robots competing all listed on the same page alone does wonders for strategy sessions.
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What Could Have Been Better…**
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Scouting Sheets**
As simple as they were, even this was far too much information. The only data that we really needed were the giant photos, average tubes scored, ramps/lift checkboxes, and the comments section. Everything else was extraneous because very few teams were exceptions to the general “4-wheel, tank drive, score high-mid-low, ok torque, medium speed, autonomous close to working” rule of most robots. The very few exceptions to these generalizations should definitely be noted in the comments section, as these are the things that make those robots unique, but otherwise those data fields are mostly wasted space. Any qualitative data such as, “This robot sucks, this one is amazing and difficult to stop, the driver on this team is clueless” ended up being left as mental notes, as in many cases it took discretion to know when is the right time to interject that information, if at all. We quickly realized that we didn’t want to have alliance partners looking at their professionally typed up scouting profile and possibly getting offended when the sheet says in print that they suck at everything. Everything printed should be purely quantitative (yes,no) facts, and you leave the more sensitive (better, worse, incredibly, suck) bits verbally, things go over a lot smoother. Be sure to screen your scouting sheets before you hand them to alliance partners, we almost accidentally offended one of our partners with a stray remark in the comments, though Mallory, our coach caught it before we handed it out. Oops. All in all though, these turned out quite well and served as a great compliment to our Match Breakdowns.
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Pictures**
As this was our first year doing photos, they did turn out quite well, but they could have been better. I scoured the web for a few hours the week before and managed to get about a dozen or so photos of teams before the they shipped. Coupled with the ones we took at scrimmage and we had a little over 20 photos ready to go before competition. However then we ran into a little problem. My father took the camera we were planning on using to LA, so we had to use another one that unfortunately could not communicate with my laptop. We ended up having to make a late-night run to Best Buy to use one of their display computers to transfer photos from the camera’s XD card to a USB drive, and back into the laptop. Yeah, a real pain. And then at around midnight I realized that we had actually missed taking photos of teams, and about others needed to be retaken as they were too dark/blurry/bad angle. But because we couldn’t update the photos at competition, we didn’t have the full photo set ready until finals. The other thing was that many teams changed their robots from practice day, from not having their robots fully assembled, to having every team member crowded over it (blocking the shot), to many robots losing arms or ramps due to weight, the robots changed quite a bit from when we took the first round of photos. In conclusion it is very important to be able to update robot photos at competition.
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Software**
While OpenOffice and PIXResizer (free batch photo processing, very useful) worked alright, we had to spend quite a bit of time drag-and-dropping, switching between 10 different windows, cut-and-pasting, reformatting, and photo resizing… Most of the 10-15 minutes we spent making each Match Breakdown was fairly repetitive and mundane. Most of it could have been automated and sped up.
Team #1861 SharcBytes did something amazing at Denver this year, they took photos of every team and had a simple (Where can you score, do you have a ramp) bubble-in. Friday morning, they passed out this binded packet with every robot in the regional to every team, it was an incredible service to everyone there. During finals selection, almost every driver had one of those in their hands. I was thinking that in the future perhaps we could take a similar approach and automate this process with software, so that during the morning of the qualification rounds, every team is given this nice Match Breakdown of all the robots they have to face that day… It would simplify many team’s lives incredibly…
** Match Recording**
We’ve avoided recording information from matches in the past simply because we haven’t had the manpower to do it. They are an incredible strategy resource, though it takes a lot of work to create, and is difficult to fact-check. Sitting at the at the scouting station, Team 1158 (#1 seed) relied exclusively on match recording, and had about 3-4 scouts up there during every match recording information into their excel database. Towards the end of the day one of their mentor’s got pretty mad because the data that some of the scouts had put in wasn’t accurate (8 tubes scored, 3 collected), but it was impossible to figure out what was accurate and what wasn’t. Knowing exactly, down to the tube what teams have done on the field is very useful, and compliments general recommendations about robots quite nicely. However difficult it may be to record match information, I really do think we should give it a go next year if we’ve got the manpower.
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Even considering the shortcomings, our scouting turned out incredible. Our drive team had the information they needed to plan effective strategies, and in the midst of the chaos and confusion, our team was able to remain calm, strong, and focused to do what needed to be done. It’s been a wonderful 3+ years with Team 662, and I am so deeply grateful for the incredible life lessons I’ve had the opportunity to learn here. The experience has been invaluable. Good luck to everyone at at championships, and my best wishes go out to the scouts. May your hard work empower your team to perform at their best.
-Chris Fornof
Scouting VP, Team 662