the pursuit of collaboration

Two heads are generally better than one, and while that truism doesn't necessarily scale very well, it can and often does in the open source software movement.

Willow Garage is out to make it happen in robotics.

They not only have developed a robot, the PR2, with sufficient dexterity to fold towels, and given eleven of these to research institutions around the world, but they've also released "an open-source, meta-operating system" for robots, called ROS, which you can download and use for free.

This is a great beginning, and could prove to be the seed of what develops into a standard platform.