"Cooperative Swarms"

 We describe a general model for cooperative swarms that involves several interacting dynamic multigraphs and identify three fundamental research challenges underlying these systems from a network science perspective. We show that the framework of constrained coalitional network games  captures in a fundamental way the basic tradeoff of benefits vs. cost of collaboration, in swarms, and demonstrate that it can explain network formation and the emergence or not of collaboration. We investigate the interrelationship between the collaboration and communication multigraphs in cooperative swarms and the role of the communication topology, among the collaborating agents, in improving the performance of distributed task execution. We show that Small World graphs emerge as a good tradeoff between performance and efficiency in consensus problems, where the latter serves as a prototypical coordination problem. We discuss extensions to expander graphs and present several results on designing communication topologies for collaborative control, some inspired from biology.