0.13 Scouting and working with your alliance

Why we collect information

In the 0.12 Competition day and the pit lesson you saw that before a match you talk with your alliance partner about who will do what. That talk only turns into a plan if you know what your partner's robot can and cannot do. The same holds for the opposing side. A team that knows where the opposing robots go on the field decides where to take its own robot before it even walks out to the field.

Collecting information about other robots for this purpose is called scouting. The information comes from two places. In the pit you talk with the team and see the robot up close. From the stands you watch the match and see what the robot really does on the field. The job is not left to one person: some of the team watch matches while others walk around the pits. This goes on from the first match of the tournament to the last qualification match.

The websites keep the numbers

Match scores, rankings and each team's contribution to a match are already on record. The official website and community websites publish them after every match, so your team does not need to write these numbers down by hand. The links are on the 0.K page.

Teams from Türkiye show up on these websites, and you can read last season's contribution numbers. The Blue Alliance, which people who know FRC will recognize, belongs to FRC. In FTC, these websites are its equivalent.

You do not need to set up a separate app for your own notes. The guide's ready-made scouting spreadsheet is in the 0.K printables table. It opens in Google Sheets, Excel and LibreOffice, and it has three fillable tabs: pit, match and selection list. If you want to print, a PDF of the same tables is there too.

Here is the difference. What you read on a website is a number. What your team records itself is an observation.

What goes in our own notes

What the websites do not give you is the detail you see in the pit and from the stands. Which of this season's tasks does the robot do, what does it do in Autonomous, does it have an unsolved problem? Asking these three questions the same way in every pit makes the answers comparable. What a team tells you may be what the robot was designed to do, so asking "did it do this at this tournament" instead of "can it do this" gets you a clearer answer. Ask for permission before you take photos.

Where you keep your notes is up to you. If you want to print and fill in by hand, there are the pit scouting and match scouting pages in 0.K. If you want to keep them on a computer, there is the spreadsheet described above. A notebook works too. The only requirement is that when someone on the team asks "how is that team's Autonomous?", the answer can be found.

There is a trap when you watch from the stands. The score on the screen is the alliance's score, the total of the work two robots did together. If you write that score down as one team's performance, you will think a weak robot playing with a strong partner is strong. When you watch, look not at the alliance's points but at the work that robot does on its own and does consistently. One match does not show the whole robot either. An Autonomous that failed in the first match may work in the second, and your notes get updated with later matches.

Spare parts are also part of the talk in the pit. A team whose servo breaks just before a match borrows one from the pit next door, and you give a part you have extra of to someone who needs it. When teams that will soon face each other on the field help each other like this, it is called Gracious Professionalism.

Planning with your partner and getting ready for selection

Before a match, all the information you collected comes down to one question. Which robot will do which task?

The first thing to talk about is Autonomous. Where on the field does each robot start, and which path does it follow? If the paths cross, one robot waits or changes its route, because when two robots collide in Autonomous, it usually ends the Autonomous for both of them. For the rest of the match, you split up the field or the tasks so that two robots do not go for the same target at once.

The talk happens at the side of the field while you wait in line. Most teams carry a small drawing of the field, draw paths on it with a whiteboard marker and wipe it clean after the match. The decision comes down to one sentence both drivers will remember, because nobody remembers a longer plan in the middle of a match. If your robot has a problem that day, tell your partner at the start, so no plan is built on a feature that does not work.

As the qualification matches go on, something else builds up in your notes: which robots you could work well alongside. The robot that scores the most points and the robot that complements yours may not be the same. A robot that does what you cannot do, and whose Autonomous does not clash with yours, is a better partner even if it scores fewer points. The same goes for you. Other teams are watching you and coming to your pit to ask. Clearly explaining the features that work on your robot decides your chance of being picked, and not doing in a match what you said you could means dropping off that team's list. How selection works is in the 0.14 Alliance selection, playoffs and advancement lesson.

Extras

• Resources and printables
• 0.12 Competition day and the pit
• 0.14 Alliance selection, playoffs and advancement