Scout Savant

A post by Peter, Tao's dad.

For the last 3 weeks I've been working at night and weekends on a scouting app for VRC. As we've discovered over the season, scouting at events is tough and many parents wished for a better way to do it. I was hoping there was an existing app to make this easier, but unfortunately none exist. Although VEX Via provides a way to get match scores, it doesn't keep the old data or provide a way to analyze it. Via also doesn't provide a way to search the data or view all the events a team attended.

Vex scouter gives the user a way to rate a team, but you have to manually enter everything. I'm lazy, so entering data for 50 or 100 teams feels a bit tedious. Given the data is up on robotevents.com, an app should come with all of that. More than once I wished robotevents.com was more user friendly and presented data more elegantly. I also wished the data on robotevents.com was more consistent.

Scout savant gives users the ability to search for events or teams and view those details. On the events page, users can see the match and rate the teams. As an event progresses, users can rate a team's performance for each match. That data is saved so that later on, you can go back and look at the notes. Before the alliance selection, users can view all of the ratings and comments taken that day to determine which teams are the top picks.

Outside of events, users can analyze teams for up coming events and do "pre scouting". One of my goals was to reduce the guess work of figuring out which teams to scout. The hope is that pre scouting can make better use of limited time and give people an indication of a team's strengths and weaknesses.

Here are some screens of Scout Savant. The app has been submitted to appstore and hopefully will be live by friday April 11.

We Are Competing Worldwide!

After our success at the New England Regional Middle School Championship, we were invited to compete at the Vex Robotics Middle School World Championship in Anaheim, California! Thanks to generous sponsorships from Concord and WPI Apartments, we will be competing!

3/22 Worcester Scrimmage

We competed in the 3/22 QCC Scrimmage in Worcester.  We ranked 1st out of 47 teams, and even scored  our season record of 95 points in one match, with help from our allies Light Speed Robotics.

This tournament was only practice rounds, 8 of them. We came to the tournament with a new feature that allowed the robot to pull itself up 12 inches to hang from a 40" bar. It worked in 6 out of 8 matches, the two failures being from bad rubber bands (Uhg! we will use surgical tubing next time), and  someone parking their robot under the hanging bar.

Fixes required:

-Using something more reliable than rubber bands for the rope retention system
-Programming! We need a goal scoring middle zone autonomous program.
-More programming! We need a good hanging zone autonomous program too.

The robot is on it's way to being ready for Worlds!

Middle School New England Champions

We won the New England Regional Middle School Vex Championship!

We learned much, and had a great time as well!  The robot we won with was capable of completing every task in the game, Vex Toss Up, and reliable at completing most of them.  It was able to drive over the bump easily, and could cross the field in only four seconds.  It could also high hang with the ball, pick up three bucky balls, score three bucky balls in the goal, pick up big balls, knock big balls off the barrier, place them on the goal, and throw big balls. But it wasn't always this way, especially when we started in October, 2013.  The first version of the robot, which used a lever arm and top roller, could only hold two bucky balls at a time, and could not hold big balls.  It also took a long time to get the balls into the goal, and sometimes fell over.  But overall it was reliable when we competed with it at the Worcester Scrimmage on November 16.  We redesigned the robot to use a scissor lift to reach the 40" bar.

We built a first version, made of steel, which was too weak and flimsy, but we decided to try again. We competed with this second version of the scissor lift at the Boston University Qualifier tournament. It performed badly, with problems like the lift being floppy, slow and getting caught on the intake. The lift was also not quite strong enough to handle the four motors used to power it. The high lift also gave it a high center of gravity, so it was easy to knock over. That is why we decided to switch to a six-bar lift for our next robot.  The six bar lift allowed for very fast lifting of a ball carriage that always stays in the same orientation, allowing for a gravity fed roller. We competed with this fourth robot at the Green Mountain Challenge. This was an improvement, but we still could not manipulate large balls, so we decided to use side rollers, which can pick up big balls in addition to bucky balls, and created our fifth robot.  But it had reliability problems when we used it at the QCC Qualifier.  Large balls often fell out of its grasp, and bucky balls frequently got jammed inside our robot. We added a launcher to throw big balls around the field, as well as improving reliability.  Both the launcher and the improved reliability were very helpful, though we did not make it in the top twenty four teams at the New Hampshire Wrap Up.   In the week between the New Hampshire Wrap Up and the Regionals, we kept the same robot, only improved it.  We were able to improve our launcher, improve our overall reliability, and add one key feature:  the high-hang, transmission driven winch.

You can see our final robot in action in this, our first semi final match.

This is our robot!

What worked:
-Our autonomous program worked if we operated it correctly
-Robot handled small balls well

What we need to change:

-Transmission gears need to be beveled more

-Transmission piston needs to be prevented from rotating

-Winch rope needs to be tighter, this involves the hanging hook being just barely high enough

-Launcher didn't launch balls at a low enough angle
-Hanging hook was hard to use
- Large ball intake could use improvement

For the full results of the regional Results of the competition
We created a YouTube Channel for the team Dream Robot YouTube Channel

Video from QCC Qualifier

QCC tournament video!

Skills practice:   http://youtu.be/eb_adh8F2YU

Seeding match:   http://youtu.be/xw1jcpkl4tg

 

QCC Qualifier Tournament 2/8/70

Attended tournament and had agreat time.  We captained the #4 alliance but lost in the semifinals to team #44. 

Problems found at tournament with our robot: 
-Robot did not intake buckyballs smoothy enough
-Robot lost big balls it was holding due to floppy intake rollers
-Robotstalled in a few matches but recovered
-Small ball launcher was ineffectivewithout belt

Vex Team: Dreaming Robot.       2013-14 Challenge “Toss Up”

Philip Hubbe, newest recruit of the team.

     This is my first time commenting, so bear with me. The Green Mountain Tournament, January 19, was the first tournament I participated in, and I learned ALOT. Though I might not list everything that could have been better, I will definitely try to get my point across.

I learned:

 Not to make judgments when you’re not sure what is going to come of it (making decisions off of what you don’t know).

What you need for basic play (not to focus on the complicated stuff when the basics aren’t working).

You should expect something to go wrong, even if you do everything possible to prevent it. (PROGRAMMING GLITCH!)

When you operate on a competition field, in a tournament format, you begin to understand the basics, which you thought you understood so well.

Another thing I would like to cover is robot design. I think in the end there is one main idea that everyone uses (all competitors), because it works and is very compact. But even though it’s the same idea, it’s built differently every time, almost explains people right there. We work! But we are all created unique.

Our Design:

We have been working on a re-invented design for over two weeks now, that’s almost done, and we believe it’s our final.

“Two problems, one solution” is our motto. We've built this one from the base up, with extreme thought, to bypass all that went wrong last time. A very crucial thing we've been doing is saving time by talking over the phone, to design stuff done before we meet and get more done when we do meet, because when we meet we don’t have time to spare.

 I have learned a lot and dedicated myself, and I am definitely not losing speed now.