Anyone have any advice for scouting systems for a 5 year old team who has never scouted before?
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Knowing a few more pieces of information will help people give more specific advice.
How many students (or students and mentors depending on numbers/availability) are you planning to assign to scouting the competition? Are you looking for an electronic system utilizing tablets/phone apps, or the classic pen and paper fed into an excel sheet? Do you want hard numbers, or are general observations more what youâre looking for?
Itâs a big topic with lots of unique approaches.
It depends on what youâre looking for in your scouting data. If you just want raw numbers, there is usually at least one team at each event that is openly sharing their data. If you want to be able to analyze the data to better figure out which teams are best for you to work with, thatâs going to be a bit more work because many teams are willing to share that information. Are you looking for a pen and paper approach (easier to develop, harder to understand later), or a mobile app (harder to get data off of, but easier to use)?
Another factor is how many team members you have. Our team has about 35 members, and 20 who travel and can scout (excluding drive team and award presenters). We had been using our own web app for a while, but this season switched over to FRC Krawler, an app available on the Google Play Store developed by team 2052, and spent the majority of our time focusing on how we wanted to analyze the data. However, at our first competition last weekend, I was speaking with another team that said they had tried other apps in the past and it hadnât worked for them, so they chose to continue paper scouting. Itâs really all about what you think is best for your team. I try to have a meeting with everyone whoâs scouting a couple days before each competition to make sure theyâre all comfortable with the way we are scouting, and will change our methods if someone brings up a legitimate reason.
We simplify. We also watch every match.
To cut down " the noise" we only watch bots that we play with (Friends/foes) and we observe them in every game up until they are on the field with us. This helps immensely with game strategy as we know recent past performance details with the teams on the field with us. We take notes and mark down tendencies in essence capabilities/liabilities. We try not to overload scouts they each have ONE bot to take notes on per match and we have a page per bot.
For eliminations: We look for âstandout performers day 1â and put them on day 2 watch list along with all likely captains (Top 16) then add anyone we statistically missed from TBA (anywhere from 0-2 teams) . Rinse repeat watch all these teams the second day. Then be ready with a list of the teams âwe wantâ to partner with based on our observations of them and our own team.
This is called Qualitative scouting with observational reduction, we verify our eyes with stats at the end of day 1. Tools Paper, pen, highlighters, Excel (For watchlists) and TBA
Results after implementing this method : Only missed elims once in 12 events in CA started this in year 2 after the rookie trip to St Louis. Scouting makes our team and alliances perform better. Its our edge. Missed two extra world trips by two SF tiebreakers by 11 points (5 and 6) . Scouting helps.
The basics are in a regional half the bots cannot help you with making it to Finals, its about the other half and getting the best possible of that half and winning games along the way by knowing the details of all teams gameplay tendencies âEyes on botsâ
Apps come and go⌠they are usually tested and dismissed as the kids like apps
Here is our actual elimination day watchlist for 2019 CADM week 1
ELIMINATION DAY LIST.pdf (410.6 KB)
This may or may not represent bots on our pick list which is pretty much solidified the night prior. This list is manily for fine tuning and strategy forming for possible elimination match ups. Whether or not we make eliminations. We also pre-scout will have details on most of the field going into CAVE in week 5 and know where we stand going in. Also helps judge risers and fallers at the event.
To be more specific:
3 team members
4-5 mentors (i think donât quote me on that number)
5 year old team
They donât compete that often
For that size of a scouting crew, it might be tough to do the traditional âone set of eyes per robot per matchâ style that is very popular. Typically scouters rotate in and out on different shifts, because a whole day of doing nothing but watching and scouting matches can be a lot to ask. Not to say you couldnât pull it off, but I might consider an approach that relies less on hard numbers like what Boltman outlined above, particularly focusing on your partners and opponents before everyone else.
Would it be wiser to utilize the scouting space with setting up a camera and match scouting back at the hotel?
Iâve tossed around the idea in my head of recording match video and playing it back later at faster speeds as a way to reduce person-hours put into scouting. The hard part is that youâre moving those person-hours to the time after a day of competition, where there are a lot less hours in the day available. Edit: Another potential issue is this also doesnât allow you to utilize your scouting data to form match strategies as the day goes on.
Here is an Excel spread sheet that has scouting sheets and tab for each page. The scouting page matches up with team data pages to make entering data a little easier. If you input the team number, name and city in the totals tab it will populate the info into the tabs for each team. ( I just copy and paste into excel from blue alliance) you will have to rename each tab. If you have someone enter the info from each match on the teamâs page it will update the totals page.
We share as a Google sheet and pull the info into Tableau to give us some charts. If we had more scouters and wifi was reliable, we would use an app and tablets. We only have two team members scouting, one for red and one blue.
It might not be pretty but it works. Someday I would like to figure out how to pull data from Blue Alliance and fill the team sheets with matches and scores, but that will have to be down the road.
Deep Space Scouting 2019.xlsx (426.5 KB)
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What event are you going to? There are many teams using FIRES. We can put you in contact with a team that is signed up to use it. Working together with another team really helps share the load.
Here is a link
https://innovators3138.org/fires/
Mr. Mike
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Like 3 team members on scouting or on the entire team?
Entire team, the team already competed at a week 2, Iâm assisting them to the best of my ability since:
- Iâm 2 hours away from them
- I canât mentor them since I am a senior
Hmm Iâm going to say something risky here and advise you scout as little as possible.
Having your few team members networking with other teams and trying to grow or improve the team might be a better use of time then scouting, especially if you donât compete often. Some teams will share scouting information if asked.
As for combining what Iâve said above into an actual plan here is what I would do in your situation.
- Knowing what kind of robot you have create a list of traits, mechanisms, and abilities that would compliment your robot.
- With said list just go pit to pit gathering and rating every robot and how much it would work with your robot. But do so by talking to teams and again networking with them. That means not being a scouting team grilling people for information, but being humans having conversations. Ask larger teams how they got to be so big and how they recruit, ask small teams that do scout what has worked for them, ask teams with sponsors for advice on how to get sponsors. (This part stems from me hating people who clearly are just scouting and not actually treating the job like a chance to network.) Make a point of asking if you can get a copy of teams match scouting data offer to train someone on their system to help out in exchange for data if you can. This will give experience with different scouting systems and the effectiveness (which will help if you donât compete often enough to create and iterate your own system).
- Always debrief and document with scouts after pit scouting especially if you did the conversation thing and learned something valuable like if you found a robot with a similar mechanism but they solved a problem you still have.
- If you get some match scouting data from another team compare it to the robot rating list from earlier to help prioritize picks. If you donât get match data from a team just go download FRC Spyder. You can select your event click on a team and it will provide ranking score, cargo points, hatch panel points, climb points, and sandstorm points. You can math that into all sorts of useful information.
- Create your final pick list, with all the compiled information.
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The way we do our scouting is the group of scouters we have are split into several groups, all of which are in charge with a number of teams they are to watch and interact with through the duration of the competition. The group will have a designated âleadâ which is in charge of their group. This gives the scouters the ability to see how their list of teams evolves and adapts through the course of the event. The number of teams each group is tasked with watching is based on the number of scouters we have and the amount of teams at the event (we like to have 2-4 people per group and 10-16 teams per group.) We also record matches in the event either a match was not properly scouted or during scouting meetings when further analyzing a team and its advantages and disadvantages. I personally would refrain from scouting via video, but rather use the video as a tool to further analyze a team.
There is always a group of these scouters we use for âstrategy scoutingâ. This pair is in charge of leading the scouting group and watching teams we will either play with or against. This group usually consists of an experienced upperclassman and a member who is interested in scouting, but is not a senior as to always have someone in this role who can continue the process in the following years.
Going back to the groups. Friday night, the scouting leads and the strategy scouters will meet together after returning from the venue to run over the data collected. At this point we go over a âpick listâ in preparation for alliance selection the following day. Even if you do not anticipate on being an alliance captain, it is important to make such a list in the event you are chosen so you can aid in the final robot choices during the alliance selection.
As for collecting data, our team prefers using traditional pen and paper over online scouting, but this is just preference. What we try to scout for this game specifically is quantitative data such as cargo and hatch panel placement. This of course changes year-to-year depending on what the game is. Our scouting is split into two separate sections: pit scouting and match scouting. The pit scouting is done during the practice day in which the groups go pit-to-pit and ask general questions about a teamâs robot and preferences. Match scouting is then dedicated to the days of which qualification matches play.
Scouting may sometimes be seen as useless and not a key part of a team, but it is just as important as any other branch of a team. Best of luck to you guys at your upcoming competition and especially at worlds.
Hey!
Recently figured out how to solve the general stress of scouting. Iâm celebratin!!
I created a Strategy Alliance, and I use the same scouting sheets as another team. That way, each team only needs to contribute 3 scouts. The head of scouting (passing papers, directing) can switch off, alleviating pressure, and allowing the head scout to talk with Drive Team.
Just DM/PM me if you have any questions! (Youâre request is a little vague, sorry)
-AJ
Make it simple to take data and easy to read. Donât try collecting too much like where they placed every hatch or ball. To make it easy to read and very simple try just using one paper per team front in back with just a couple important hinges like how many hatches how many balls and where the climbed. Iâd u have room u can add what level or things like was the climb fast or slow.
!!! @Hailey.faiella
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