As a member of a team ready to compete for the first time in week three, I’m curious if other teams could talk about the success of their scouting programs. I’ve seen a number of teams post their scouting systems here at CD, and am curious how they have performed.
What information has been really important? What information do you wish you had gathered? What statistics are most useful in analyzing a team? Those kind of things I think would be interesting for other teams’ scouts to know.
Teams get caught up with their own robots and rightfully so. However, getting caught up with all of the other teams is just as important. Scouting 63 other teams at the VCU regional this past weekend considering we’ve never seen any of those teams before was a full-time job for 5 of our students from day 1, practice day and the night before elimination matches, Friday.
We debuted our DS scouting system at Arizona this past weekend, and to some degree it was quite successful. As it was the first time using it (and our scouts are new members, mind you… they did a wonderful job!) we had several problems with communication, but we should have everything wired out by LA. One thing we noticed was having 6 people scouting is you have to have people to replace them from time to time, which is one thing we definitely learned from this regional. As far as the actual scouting system is concerned, I believe it worked almost flawlessly, allowing us to quickly organize the data in any way we wanted. It took me 10 minutes to get the scouting data completely ready for our meeting Friday night, and I believe it was our quickest scouting meeting to date. I’m very confident with how this system is evolving and hope it will be available to any teams wanting to try it out next year!
We found that scouting on Thursday is almost pointless. The practice rounds are not very comparible to actual matches, being that they last longer, not all teams are there, and teams don’t try as hard. Thursday is better spent working on the robot. However, you could get an idea of robot’s options on the field, although their performance could be radically different
As posted in another thread, Thursday is good for pit scouting, not match scouting.
Consistent ball knocking, autonomous, and lack of penalties are key. Also, ranking does not mean everything, or in some cases, anything.
^ True. 1676 (I think, correct me if I’m wrong) had a low ranking but pursuaded an alliance that they had what it takes to win. Sure enough, they did. You just have to know how to use the data to your advantage, no matter which side of the fence you’re on.