Plant protection UAV operation has the advantages of safety and efficiency, saving medicine and water volume, strong adaptability, good prevention and control effects, using UAVs to carry out plant protection operations is an important way to effectively prevent pests and diseases. Compared the research on the development and related applications industry, the factors that affected the operation effect and efficiency of the plant protection UAVs were analyzed. Flight control system, single UAV route planning, multimachine operation scheduling scenarios and optimization methods that affected the efficiency and effect of plant protection UAV were described respectively. With the aim of improving the operation effect and operation efficiency of plant protection drones, the status of plant protection UAVs’ flight control, route planning and scheduling were analyzed. In view of the high accuracy requirements of plant protection UAVs, which led to the contradiction of high manufacturing costs of their flight control systems, the lowcost and highprecision attitude measurement devices were developed which can meet the needs of plant protection UAV operations, and corresponding attitude estimation algorithms were developed. For the situation that the plant protection UAVs route planning, optimal scheduling model did not match the actual operation requirements, the optimization scenarios, constraints and optimization methods of single UAV route planning and multimachine scheduling were summarized. Finally, an automatic replenishment platform for plant protection UAVs was developed, an optimized model for job management and scheduling model were built based on multimachine collaboration, and the reliability of plant protection UAVs in complex operation environments was improved. 