2005 Boiler Online Scouting System (B.O.S.S.)

Overview

WBI organized a comprehensive, live, multi-team scouting system during the following 2005 season competitions:

• The Boilermaker Regional
• The Midwest Regional
• The Championship Event

For its efforts in distributing scouting information to teams in the Midwest Regional, WBI won the Team Spirit Award.

How it worked

Type of information collected

• Pit Data - BOSS scouts went to each team's pit and collected data on what their robot can theoretically do. This is all done on Thursday.
• Robot Photos - A separate group of photo scouts went to each team's pit and took at least 3 photos of each robot. This was all done on Thursday.
• Field Data - Also known as match performance scouting. 6 scouts watched each match. Each scout was assigned to a robot and his/her job is to fill out a field scouting form that thoroughly evaluated the team's performance in that match. This was done on Friday and Saturday.

Ways to access this data

• Wireless Internet - We broadcasted our own wireless network (named 461SCOUT) and offered our entire database as a single downloadable web page. Any team could access this page and all they needed is a computer with a wireless card. No passwords were necessary to view the information and all teams had equal access. We had several repeaters setup throughout the regional to make the database accessible from everywhere.
• Connection with CAT5 Cable - If teams were not able to access our wireless network for some reason they were welcome to stop by the scouting center and plug into our network.
• Distributed on a CD - If you were one of the top 15 teams at the end of Friday, we burn the database on a CD for you on Friday night to help you in your alliance picking. You received the CD on early Saturday morning so you had enough time to analyze the data. We also burned 1 CD of the database for each alliance participating in the finals. The alliances received this during the break after alliance picking.

What's the point?

Scouting was a relatively new activity among the majority of FIRST teams and also did not get as much recognition as it should have. It was extremely important to build a good robot but there was more to it than that. If teams had access to valuable information, they could plan strategies and if they ended up in the top 8 teams, they could quickly decide which teams would be their best allies.

General Theory

The idea behind our scouting system was to get FIRST teams to combine efforts to make ONE comprehensive and highly informative scouting database that all teams could access live during the competition. The match performance and robots' capabilities depended on the team and not who scouted them, so if several teams could organize together and collect this information into a central database we wouldn't have to each scout the same data over and over. However, this did not mean that every team would use the data in the same way. It was up to each individual team to read through and interpret the data however they wished. The data was offered in many different views and also in CSV format, which allowed it to be imported into applications like Excel, Access, etc for analysis.

Did this work?

Yes! We proved that the B.O.S.S. worked at the 2005 Boilermaker Regional, 2005 Midwest Regional, and the 2005 Championship: Curie Division. It was a great success; many teams used it including many of the finalists. At those competitions, 461, 269, 930, 1646, and 1525 organized to scout together.

Let's see the data!

2005 Boilermaker Regional

Our data is available in two formats:

• As a single downloadable HTML page.
  • View HTML Page
• As separate CSV (Comma Separated Value) pages that you can use in common applications such as Microsoft Excel, Open Office, etc.
  • Download Teams List
  • Download Match Data
  • Download Pit Scouting Data
  • Download Field Scouting Data

Click here to see photos of each robot that attended this competition

2005 Midwest Regional

Our data is available in two formats:

• As a single downloadable HTML page.
  • View HTML Page
• As separate CSV (Comma Separated Value) pages that you can use in common applications such as Microsoft Excel, Open Office, etc.
  • Download Teams List
  • Download Match Data
  • Download Pit Scouting Data
  • Download Field Scouting Data

Click here to see photos of each robot that attended this competition

2005 Championship Event

Click here to see photos of each robot that attended this competition.