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.

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Effective Algorithms for a Class of Discrete Valued Optimal Control Problems.- Minimum Time Multi-UGV Surveillance.- A Distributed Network Enabled Weapon-Target Assignment for Combat Formations.- Simultaneous Localization and Planning for Cooperative Air Munitions Via Dynamic Programming.- A New Multi-objective Control Design for Autonomous Vehicles.- Maximizing Search Coverage Using Future Path Projection for Cooperative Multiple UAVs with Limited Communication Ranges.- Operator Aided Decision Processes for UAVs in a Stochastic Environment.- Dynamics and Control of Surface Exploration Robots on Asteroids.- Trajectory Generation for Relative Guidance of Merging Aircraft.- A Comparative Study of Task Assignment and Path Planning Methods for Multi-UGV Missions.- Optimal Control of the Weapon Operating Characteristic with Control Inequality Constraints.- Autonomous Target Detection and Localization Using Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.- Cooperative Control of Multiple Swarms of Mobile Robots with Communication Constraints.- Towards Optimal Positioning of Surveillance UGVs.- The Maximum Weight Independent Set Problem for Data Association in Multiple Hypothesis Tracking.- New Results in Stochastic Cooperative Games: Strategic Coordination for Multi-resolution Performance Robustness.- Switching among Solvers: Collaborative Algorithms with Parameter Control.- An Event-Driven Software Architecture for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Cooperatively Locate Mobile Targets.- Robust Track Association and Fusion with Extended Feature Matching.- Optimal Cooperative Thermalling of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.- Model Predictive Control of Vehicle Formations.- Application of Monkey Search Meta-heuristic to Solving Instances of the Multidimensional Assignment Problem.- Robust Wireless Network Jamming Problems.- A Token-Based Approach to Sharing Beliefs in a Large Multiagent Team.- Development of a Mission Simulator for Design and Testing of C2 Algorithms and HMI Concepts across Real and Virtual Manned-Unmanned Fleets.