Im a member of a rookie team and i was wondering what are some things that are important to put on your scouting sheets?
Versatility, tetra handling, speed/power, scoring ability
There are a few different things that need to be taken into account with scouting sheets.
Prescouting
It’s to your advantage to do some prescouting before your first competition. Look at websites, chief, other competition results, scouting databases (I am under the impression that Soap 108 runs a database), etc. These are resources that will give you a great idea of what sort of competition you’re coming into. Keep an eye out for what’s happening, and record it on a sheet for each team, or whatever you choose to do.
During the Competition: Results
How does this team perform quantitatively? Do they win their matches? Do they lose their matches? What is their ranking at the end of the day? These are basic things you should record, maybe on a simple table. I.e.,
Team > Wins > Losses > Scores (larger comment box) > Rank
During the Competition: Performance
How does this team perform qualitatively? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Michael Hill pointed out some great things to notice in the post above here somewhere. That is a great guideline. You should have a decent idea of what the team does during autonomous mode. Compatibility is crucial. Will their programming, actions, and strategy be compatible with your team? They may be awesome, but it doesn’t make them compatible. Discuss carefully your priorities with your design team and drivers.
I would highly recommend a fairly simple system, although I just threw a lot of information at you. You need to be able to record these with your scouting team with much efficiency. If you are scouting alone, simplicity is exceptionally important.
Good luck!
- Genia
i made a scouting sheet last year in excel that divided up between pit scouting and match scouting. unfortunatly, my computer crashed in the summer so ill start looking through my back up disks to see if i still have the sheet. ill edit it and tell u when im done, that way you have an example to go by and you can edit it to your needs. ----------- good luck to all rookies-------------
Here are a few things we put on our scouting sheets from last year -
Team Number
Team Name
Robot Description (Quick summary of robot)
Autonomous Mode Description
Human Player Accuracy
Then we had the various robot capabilities, for example last year we had “Hanger” as a category, and if a robot could hang in last year’s game, we would put an X by it, and then stated what it did in every match.
The forms were made in excel, but they were filled out by hand and kept in a scouting notebook. I found this to be the easiest way to go. Private message me if you’d like to see what it looks like.
Edit: Also, 234 does a scouting board for our regionals and division at Nationals. What is a scouting board, you ask? A scouting board is a resource for all teams - basically on practice day, we send people out to go around and take pictures of every robot. Then we crop the pictures, put their respective team numbers on each photo, and then paste them in sequencial order. This is all said and done by the first day and match of elimination rounds, and is a big help to all teams.
our team usually goes with some simple description of the robot, what they can do in autonomous mode, and team number/name. I posted a simple white paper on CD that can be found here .
This is pretty basic, and can be added to if you want to put a place for certain other things, my team believes simple is better.
good luck!
We also have “pit” scouting and match scouting. Pit scouting is a simple sheet that lists types of motors, types of drivetrain, etc about basics of the robot. Then you have various features listed, and checkmark whether the robot is capable of doing that… (hanging, 2x capping, ball collecting, automode). We have scouts go out usually on Thursday and ask every other team each of these questions.
Match scouting I find the most important/useful. Along with what everyone has said, you need to know the trend of what each robot can and can’t do. Although a team told you on Thursday that their robot has the ability to hang, they may not actually do it in matches, or they might remove that feature the next day, or something.
So, list the important items that you want to know about:
mobility, tetra stacking, speed, push power, automode, whatever else you might want.
You can have a “ranking” for each item, where the scout will rank how good they think the robot does a particular task.
Then, you can have a line for each where your scouts can manually write out what that robot did in the match, for each of those topics, like a summary of their match performance, but broken down. So… i.e for push power - if a robot gets easily pushed around all match, you would note that there. Automode - if a robot did nothing, write that. If it stacked a vision tetra, write that. Speed - if a robot is super slow/fast, write that. If it has multiple speeds and uses them well, write that.
You can then have an additional comments section for misc things like… if a robot tips easy… if they drove in circles…if there’s something unique… anything not covered in your specific topics.
I feel this helps identify a trend in how a team plays, and what their strategies might be. This helps for when you are with AND against them. It also helps to figure out who is compatible with your own robot if going into finals, and it helps identify the reliability of their robot.
You just have to figure out what is important to your team, and record it. It can sometimes be intensive for the scouts, but they need to understand how vital that information can be to the driveteam. You can review all your scout reports Friday night, and possibly narrow down the list of teams that you specifically want to scout more extensively on Saturday, in order to relieve some work for the scouts.
Everyone does it differently.