We consider the problem of letting a network of mobile agents distributedly track and maintain a formation while using communication schemes that are asynchronous, broadcasts based, and prone to packet losses. To this purpose we revisit and modify an existing distributed optimization algorithm that corresponds to a distributed version of the Newton Raphson (NR) algorithm. The proposed scheme uses then robust asynchronous ratio consensus algorithms as building blocks, and employs opportune definitions for the local cost functions to achieve the desired coordination objective. In our algorithm, indeed, we code the position of the to-be-followed target as the minimum of a shared global cost, and capture the desired inter-robots behaviors through dedicated distances-based potential barriers. We then check the effectiveness of the strategy using field tests, and verify that the scheme achieves the desired goal of introducing robustness to changes in the agents positions due to unexpected disturbances. More precisely, if an agent breaks the formation, then the update mechanism embedded in our scheme make that agent move back to a meaningful position as soon as some packets are successfully received by the misplaced agent.