Mobile robots have wide applications in challenging real-world scenarios. Therefore, it is necessary to have an advanced controller to control the robotic systems smoothly. An artificial bee colony optimization algorithm and recurrent neural network are combined to develop a hybrid controller and implemented for multi-robotic navigational problems in unknown static and dynamic environments. The designed controller is validated through MATLAB simulations coupled with real-time experiments. Results obtained via both the testing platforms are analysed, and found a good agreement between them as the deviation is less than 5.5%. Further, the developed controller is compared with existing controllers, and improvements of 20%, 10.19%, 13.53% is noted in terms of path length.