Research with collaborative robotic systems has much to gain by leveraging concepts and ideas from the areas of multi-agent systems and the social sciences. In this paper we propose an approach to formalizing and grounding important aspects of collaboration in a collaborative system shell for robotic systems. This is done primarily in terms of the concept of delegation, where delegation will be instantiated as a speech act. The formal characterization of the delegation speech act is based on a preformal theory of delegation proposed by Falcone and Castelfranchi. We show how the delegation speech act can in fact be used to formally ground an abstract characterization of delegation into a FIPA-compliant implementation in an agent-oriented language such as JADE, as part of a collaborative system shell for robotic systems. The collaborative system shell has been developed as a prototype and used in collaborative missions with multiple unmanned aerial vehicle systems.