AbstractThis paper studies the formation control of multiple quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle systems (MQUAVSs) with external disturbance. A new adaptive fixed‐time cooperative control protocol is designed for MQUAVSs. A fixed‐time command filtered compensation control technology is presented to overcome the “explosion of complexity” issue, and a new fixed‐time error compensation signal is designed to compensate the filtering error, which improves the convergence speed of the system. Adaptive neural network technology is introduced to deal with unknown nonlinear functions in the system. A fixed‐time stability theorem is presented for MQUAVSs to ensure that MQUAVSs can reach the predetermined formation and the formation tracking errors converge to the neighborhood of the origin in a fixed time. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the formation simulation of MQUAVs.