[Conor Ryan]

I recommend this for the Moderated Forum before it gets sticky

Ahh, The great collaborative design debate. Heres my 2 cents,

I don't see anything wrong with collaborative design? Why because all of the efforts that I've seen made are not all done by one team, its team work. Both teams come together and pool resources and build not one, but two robots, that tend to be very similar. Don't look at this as many people do, with one team leeching off of the other, the simple way to explain how it works is 2 heads are better than one. If you combine two teams you get a lot of benefits, double the mentors, double the resources, double the experience, pretty much a doubled team.

When one team meshes with another team and they can help each side's weaknesses, say one team has really strong programming but a weak electrical team, and another teams has strong electrical but weak programming, they come together and both end up with strong electrical and strong programming.

Never assume that when two (or even three) teams have a collaborative design that one team does all the work and the other two (or three) just sit around waiting to assemble their own. "Stock" Robots are the biggest misconception, these teams didn't get their designs from anywhere, they still came up with them on their own like any other team, the only difference is they worked on the project with another team.