In this talk, first I will give an overview of the programs within the CMMI division at the NFS and describe the goal and opportunities within the control systems program. Second, I will present some recent research on the currently active topic of multi-agent formation control. Considered is a class of distributed control problems that is dominated by task coupling, dynamic constraints and actuator limitations. A geometric formulation of the associated constraints provides a unifying framework for a number of formation control problems including electronic attack, rigid formation keeping, and formation reconfiguration. The proposed framework advocates a shift in paradigm from the traditional TPBVP (Two-point Boundary Value Problem) formulation to a sub-optimal approach that leads to effective, real time control algorithms. In particular, it lends itself to simultaneous on-line, real time, trajectory synthesis and tracking with guarantees of dynamic feasibility, scalability and reduced computational complexity.