The capability of using cooperative small vehicles is of interest in many applications. From material transportation up to farming operations, the use of small machines achieving small tasks, but able to work together in order to complete a larger work, permits to rely on a unique kind of vehicle. In order to be efficient, such a point of view requires the vehicles to be, at least partially, autonomous and their motion must be accurately coordinated for the tasks to be properly achieved. This paper proposes a control framework dedicated to the accurate control of a fleet of mobile robots operating in formation. Decentralized control relying on inter-robot communication has been favored. In order to ensure a high relative positioning, adaptive and predictive control techniques are considered, enabling to account for the influence of several phenomena (such as dynamic perturbations or bad grip conditions) depreciating the relevance of classical approaches based on ideal robots and ideal contact conditions assumptions.