Author: Rishi Bala
Email: rishibala2007@gmail.com
Repository: https://github.com/rbala25/VEX-Scouting
Languages: JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3
Technology: Express.js, Node.js, EJS, MongoDB, Mongoose, AWS EC2
Other Dependencies: Axios, Cookie-Parser, Node-Cron, Express-Sesssion
Robot Events API: API v2
I have competed in some form of VEX Robotics since 2015, over 8 years as of right now. In my last 3 years of VRC, I have come to realize that winning tournaments takes more than building a good robot. While that is certainly important, picking alliance partners and broadcasting your team's name out there is as imporant, if not more.
Scouting teams takes tons of effort. Even with dedicated team members at competitions, you can't hope to meet every single team. It's an extremely tedious process, using your 5 minutes of downtime between matches to look for a team, realize they aren't even there, and then have to scramble back to the field for your next match. Even when you do find the team, oftentimes the chances that they are someone you'd consider to pick is extremely low. With this website, we are able to record every team we meet with efficiently, as well as having the knowledge of which teams are more experienced and skillful than others.
The Algorithm and Data Requests
Every 24 hours, the website requests data from the public RobotEvents API. The website takes all the information it can find about every single registered team, storing it on a database, and then using a series of mathamatical operations to calculate a teams True Skill.
Every team starts with a True Skill of 0. As the website sifts through each and every single registered robot, it adds points depending on the teams proven success. It takes in factors such as if the team made VEX World's last year, and it adds a certain amount of points for every single award the team has earned over the last two seasons. Furthermore, while RobotEvents does not directly release much team information to the public, the website still goes through every team and manages to calculate dozens of different factors, such as World Skills Standings. This leads to an accurate depiction of any teams skill level.
The Alliance Selector
The Alliance Selector is largely based off of our TrueSkill rankings. When a user requests team rankings for any given event, the website sorts through all participating teams in that event and lists them based off of their calculated True Skill. If the user selects certain filter valuations that they want in a robot, the website will again go through all partcipating teams and temporarily add more points to their True Skill ranking if they apply to this category. Once again, this leads to an accurate ranking for all participating teams.