Book excerpt: Cooperative, collaborating autonomous systems are at the forefront of research efforts in numerous disciplines across the applied sciences. There is constant progress in solution techniques for these systems. However, despite this progress, cooperating systems have continued to be extremely difficult to model, analyze, and solve. Theoretical results are very difficult to come by. Each year, the International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization (CCO) brings together top researchers from around the world to present new, cutting-edge, ideas, theories, applications, and advances in the fields of autonomous agents, cooperative systems, control theory, information flow, and optimization. The works in this volume are a result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Eighth Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, January 30 – February 1, 2008.