Abstract: Considering complex, diverse and stereoscopic task requirements, heterogeneous unmanned systems (HUS) integrate across-domain advantages of air, ground and sea, respectively, which maximizes the overall capabilities of the system and provides strong technical support for future collaborative operations and smart livelihoods. Firstly, this paper reviews the promotional documents issued in the field of cross-domain collaboration both domestically and internationally, and introduces the practical engineering applications of HUS in military, scientific research and civilian fields. Secondly, this paper only focuses on collaborative control, one of the key technologies of HUS. And based on control theory and control engineering, the latest research progress in four aspects: consensus, trajectory tracking, formation-containment and different communication conditions, was elaborated. Among them, due to the difference between the theoretical nature of upper level control and the feasibility of lower level control in consensus and trajectory tracking, further research on trajectory tracking was shown from four aspects: sliding mode control, adaptive control, backstepping control and adaptive dynamic programming. Thirdly, in order to better promote the research and the practical application of HUS collaborative control, the technical?bottlenecks that urgently need to be addressed in three aspects: multiple constraints and real-time problem, multi-task switching control problem and stability under cross-domain communication, were discussed by summarizing the previous relevant work. Finally, based on the current research status and practical needs of HUS collaborative control, its development directions will tend towards three aspects: deep reinforcement learning and distributed games, human-machine interaction and anti-swarm intelligence.