AbstractThis article investigates the cooperative time‐varying formation control for heterogeneous multi‐agent systems (HMASs) with unknown actuator faults and external disturbances. The HMASs consist of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). In order to overcome the difficulty of coordinated control caused by the different structures of UAVs and UGVs, the comprehensive dynamics models of HMASs are derived, of which the model uncertainties as well as actuator faults and external disturbances of the models are considered. Subsequently, combining the radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) with adaptive technology and boundary layer theory, a distributed fault‐tolerant time‐varying formation control method is designed. The proposed control method is totally distributed. Finally, the effectiveness of the controller is verified by several simulations.