An adaptive formation control approach is proposed for nonhonolomic multiple mobile robots considering unknown slipping and skidding. It is assumed that unknown slipping and skidding effects are bounded by unknown constants. Under this assumption, the adaptive technique is employed to estimate the bounds of unknown slipping and skidding effects of each mobile robot. To deal with the skidding effect included in kinematics, the dynamic surface design approach is applied to design a local controller for each mobile robot. Using Lyapunov stability theorem, the adaptation laws for tuning bounds of slipping and skidding are induced and it is proved that all signals of the closed-loop system are bounded and the tracking errors and the synchronization errors of the path parameters converge to an adjustable neighborhood of the origin. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.