A distributed formation control method for cooperative collision avoidance and formation maintenance of multiple mobile miniature robots is presented. Combined with the motion control model of mobile miniature robots, a path planning method is proposed, so that the robots can avoid collision in real time. Utilized the proposed model, a novel controller for formation control is designed by the Lyapunov method, and it can guarantee the trajectory tracking and cooperative collision avoidance within bounded error. The complexity of the formation control is reduced by transforming it into tracking trajectory of the mass center of whole formation, thus it can be better applied to multiple mobile miniature robotwith limited computing resources. The stability and feasibility of the control method are verified by simulation, analysis and comparison, and both the formation control and cooperative collision avoidance are carried out in the practical experiments.The experimental results demonstrate that the method can be applied to the cooperative collision avoidance and formation control of multiple mobile miniature robots effectively.