Stephen, you have many good ideas in your pitch for collaboration among teams. Helping to start new teams and keep existing teams in the game is a very important task, and anything that would assist teams is a winner by my books. However, let's not forget that old mantra about "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime."
I am not against total collaboration, but if two or three teams decide to work they should also each still have some autonomy. I would actively encourage the teachers / engineers / parents of the teams to try to help each other, but let each team still create their
own ideas. Once each team has their own ideas, let the other team(s) conduct a "peer-review" where each team can critique the other team's ideas to help refine them. This way, you still have teams collorabating and you will still end up with two or three different robots.
Creativity, not cloning, is the mother lode of successful innovention.
(And yes, I just combined invention and innovation into one word. 
)
And after all, what fun would the competition be if we had 1000 indentical robots?
