This paper proposes a CPSO (Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization)-based MPC (Model Predictive Control) scheme to deal with formation control problem of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots. In a distributed MPC framework, each robot needs to optimize control input sequence over a finite prediction horizon considering control inputs of the other robots where their cost functions are coupled by the state variables of the neighboring robots. In order to optimize the control input sequence, a CPSO algorithm is adopted and modified to fit into the formation control problem. Experiments are performed on a group of nonholonomic mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CPSO-based MPC for multi-robot formation.