The paper aims to study the problem of obstacle avoidance in air?ground cooperative tracking control for the unmanned aerial helicopter (UAH),in which a new approach of designing the path obstacle avoidance plan and controller design is proposed.Initially, as for the uncertain linear UAH,by processing and judging two?dimensional environmental information within the warning range for the UAH,an obstacle avoidance strategy is proposed with the help of wall?following algorithm,and the flight angle of obstacle avoidance path and the tracking speed that can make up for bypass distance are calculated.Secondly,the proposed obstacle avoidance method is extended to the three?dimensional case,and the flight angle of the UAH is determined based on the obstacle information in the horizontal and vertical directions,which can reduce the bypass distance caused by the obstacle avoidance link as possible.Thirdly,based on two derived obstacle avoidance algorithms above,the artificial neural network (ANN) is introduced to estimate model uncertainty,and then the tracking control design schemes are established by using feedforward compensation and optimal control technologies.some simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed obstacle avoidance strategy and control algorithm.