Abstract: Taking the posture deviation based virtual target tracking as the control model,a service based robot motion behavior structure is presented for multi-robot formation control,which is independent of robot formation control and cooperation tasks.The detailed basic motion behavior and its selection criteria are also designed.The service based robot motion behavior structure with reusability borrows the idea from the service-orientated architecture(SOA) in software engineering. Simulation and experiments with multi-robot formation initialization and change demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.