Figures Abstract The advancement of autonomous multi-robot systems is critical for addressing the mobility challenges within modern smart city environments. Distributed, acceleration-based controllers are designed and mathematically validated for a Segway swarm navigating cluttered, time-varying urban settings. A Lyapunov-based Control Scheme (LbCS) is utilized to develop a potential function governing collective swarm behavior. This function ensures target convergence, enforces formation cohesion, and prevents inter-agent collisions. It also dictates safe navigation around static geometric constraints (modeled as disks and lines) and the evasion of independent dynamic obstacles. System stability is formally proven, demonstrating asymptotic controllability and convergence to the desired equilibrium state. Numerical simulations verify the framework’s performance across four distinct scenarios, highlighting emergent reactive behaviors to moving entities. These results establish control strategies for the safe collective operation of non-holonomic robots, providing a theoretical foundation for future prototype development in smart city applications. Citation: Chand RP, Chand R, Lal K, Sharma B, Kumar SA (2026) Maximizing mobility: Distributed controllers of a Segway swarm for autonomous navigation in smart city environments. PLoS One 21(8): e0356369. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356369 Editor: Jiapeng Liu, Qingdao University, CHINA Received: February 20, 2026; Accepted: August 3, 2026; Published: August 28, 2026 Copyright: © 2026 Chand et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: Primary Repository (Full Data): The complete simulation results are available via DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19878531 and have been uploaded as Supporting Information. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. 1 Introduction The continuous expansion of modern infrastructure, particularly within the Smart City framework, necessitates highly adaptable micromobility solutions [1]. Global urbanization is steadily