The coordination between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is a proactive research topic whose great value of application has attracted vast attention. This paper outlines the motivations for studying the cooperative control of UAVs and UGVs, and attempts to make a comprehensive investigation and analysis on recent research in this field. First, a taxonomy for classification of existing unmanned aerial and ground vehicles systems (UAGVSs) is proposed, and a generalized optimization framework is developed to allow the decision-making problems for different types of UAGVSs to be described in a unified way. By following the proposed taxonomy, we show how different types of UAGVSs can be built to realize the goal of a common task, that is target tracking, and how optimization problems can be formulated for a UAGVS to perform specific tasks. This paper presents an optimization perspective to model and analyze different types of UAGVSs, and serves as a guidance and reference for developing UAGVSs.