First of all I would like to say that I have immense respect for any team that collaborates with another team on the design and building of a robot. That is a process (that I have never done) that I can tell takes a serious commitment and a lot of hard work.
But I was asked by a person on my team if I would ever consider doing it. Honestly, no. The one thing that I love about our team is that every year our robot looks different. We don't always go with the normal and you can almost never find a robot that looks remotely like ours.
Secondly, I think that building twins or triplets is an effective game strategy but it knocks you out of the running for technical awards (which can get you to Nationals). It also, in my mind, defeats the purpose of FIRST. FIRST is about (to me anyway) inspiring engineering and while triplets demonstrate what many businesses do, I see FIRST as a program meant to inspire new ideas and new methods of creation, not mimic those already present.
Triplets or twins are well and good, and congrats to teams that completed them successfully, but I think I'll stick with my coffee grinder robot that definitely gets attention!
