Aiming at the characteristics of the kinematic model of nonholonomic vehicle, considering that the interaction relationships among the vehicles are local, a distributed formation control algorithm for nonholonomic vehicles based on leaderfollower is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a distributed estimation strategy is proposed, which estimates the states, including the position, orientation, and linear velocity of the (virtual) leader for each follower vehicle. Then, a formation control algorithm is designed based on the tracking error of each follower vehicle. An asymptotic stability and convergence analyses of the algorithm are performed using Lyapunov tools. Finally, the visual positioning and control experiment platform of multiple vehicles was constructed; and simulation and experiment results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.