The ship platoon will become an important form of water transport in the future. This paper analyzes the characteristics and control principle of ship platoon cooperative control, and analyzes the current situation and methods in the four aspects of ship-shore cooperative platoon, platoon control model, platoon motion control and typical platoon applications. The current bottlenecks of ship platoon control technology are summarized, including human-machine fusion control, platoon motion control uncertainty modeling, platoon cooperative consistency control modeling, robust control under communication constraints and consistency control. In the future development of ship platoons, we should focus on solving the problems of platoon motion modeling based on data-driven and mechanism fusion, ship platoon control based on the biological group mechanism and the application of hierarchical control in ship platoon control.