One of the most challenging goals in multi-robot systems is the cooperative control of swarms of robots to establish a complex formation. The large size of the community and the complexity of the task are the main obstructions that hinder the attainment of the goal. In this paper, we overcome these difficulties by introducing a multi-group coordination control methodology for robot swarms. Decomposition of robot swarms to multiple groups increases versatility of the whole community in operating in intricate environment. We formulate the problem into two parts: inter-group formation and intra-group formation. In the inter-group formation, coordination of groups in the community is considered, and in the intra-group formation, the formation of individuals in the groups is studied. Moreover, the concept of adaptive interactive force is proposed to cope with the inter-group interactions. Theoretical analysis of the stability of the multi-group control system is presented. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed method. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.