What is iCANscout?
An app that lets you easily scout Vex and FIRST robot matches, calculate rankings and display team results.
We are a group of high school students that has participated in Vex and FIRST robotics for the past four years, and have scouted an unnervingly large number of matches. Scouting is the process evaluating other robots during matches for the sake of optimizing alliance pairings and deciding on strategies for each match, due to the strategy intensive nature of both competitions. Scouting properly can often make the difference between winning or losing against other alliances. Most robot teams that scout do so with paper and pencil.
We believe that there are three big problems with paper and pencil scouting:
- It requires multiple people, which lowers the amount of people that can be working on the robot.
- It is difficult to sort through all the data that you've collected.
- It is time consuming to enter all of the data and score teams
We built an app to make robot scouting faster, easier, and more efficient. iCANscout has these features:
- One person can easily input scores for all teams at once through one iPhone or iPod
- All data is quickly and automatically sorted to rank the teams that you have scouted. Rankings are done by total score and performance in individual score categoreis, e.g. floor goals.
- A short guide to the benefits of scouting and a how to on scouting
- The ability to export data onto our website for the robotics community
This last feature is the one that we're the most excited about; with the potential to have detailed match data for all competition robots, we will be able to use our website to create a database for scouting and create a platform by which we're able to allow teams to be better acquainted with other teams than ever before.
Instead of students building a robot, going to a competition and seeing a lot of cool designs, and then going back to iterate, we want to allow teams to use our readily available statistics to determine which strategies are working, and which are not.
What is the money being used for?
Our $800 goal is going to be used to submit to the app store, host our website, as well as advertise our product through several mediums. In order to share with the world all of our compiled scouting data, we first need users to collect it. By buying ad space we hope to draw in new users quickly in order for us to have plenty of data to display on our website.
Which competitions will this work for?
The Vex 2013 Sack Attack. iCANscout will launch with support for Vex Sack Attack.
FRC 2013 competitions. The FRC 2013 rules will be released in January 2013, and we'll launch support for the new FRC by February 2013.
If we're able to get enough traction with Kickstarter, we want to be able to expand into other competitions after the 2013 FRC season.
When will the iCANscout app be ready?
We're actually going through the process of submitting to the App Store right now! Hopefully in the next week or so the first version of the app will be ready for use. Join our e-mail list to get a notification when the app goes live.
Risks and challenges
Our major potential setbacks are:
-Exporting Team Data to the Cloud
-Providing a Website for Reviewing Data
-Social Community for Scouting
These challenges are the primary hurdles that we have to clear for our project. Hopefully our experience in iOS and web development will allow our project to run smoothly.
The good news about this project is that the app is already going through the process submitting to the Apple App Store! In order to keep you informed, we'll periodically edit the kick starter showing our progress thus far.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
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Zero. Nothing. Nada. We believe that this tool should be available for all robot enthusiasts, so we're making it free.
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Funding period
- (30 days)