A cooperative control method for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based on predatory escaping pigeon-inspired optimization is proposed in this paper. The outer controller is designed by the potential field method, which convert the UAV close formation to an abstract motion in potential field. The inner controller is devised by pigeon-inspired optimization (PIO) to optimize the control inputs. The structure of PIO has been adjusted on the basis of the basic PIO thoughts. The predatory escape behavior mechanism is adopted to solve the problem of falling into local optimum. Series of comparative experiments with basic PIO, particle swarm optimization (PSO) are conducted, and the experimental results verified the feasibility, validity and superiority of our proposed method.