FRC AutoScout
Software that watches a FIRST Robotics match video and records where every robot is.
- Role
- Co-founder & CTO
- When
- 2026–present
- 6robots per match
- 10positions per second
Background
At FIRST Robotics competitions, teams choose their alliance partners using scouting data. Usually students collect it by watching every match and keeping tallies. It takes a lot of people and it’s easy to make mistakes. Big teams with lots of volunteers end up with much better data.
What it does
AutoScout takes the video of a match and records where each robot is on the field, ten times a second.
First it reads the scoreboard to get the match time and the six teams playing. Then it finds and follows each robot, and uses markers on the field to work out where the camera is. That lets it turn each robot’s spot in the video into a spot on the field. Last, it reads the team number off each robot’s bumper.
Identifying robots
Telling the robots apart is the hardest part, since they often look alike and block each other. A wrong team number is worse than no number, because teams would be making decisions on bad data. So AutoScout only labels a robot when it actually reads a bumper number that matches one of the teams in the match.
For teams
Teams upload a match video on the website. They get back a spreadsheet of every robot’s position, a replay on a map of the field, shot counts for each team, and heatmaps of where each robot drove. There are also tools to help with picking alliance partners.
It’s in beta now, and we’re planning a full launch for the 2027 season.
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