The rapid development of communication technology and autonomous driving technology has brought new opportunities for cooperative control of the vehicle platoon. Cooperative control of vehicle platoons can effectively enhance the driving safety of vehicles, increase traffic capacity, decrease traffic congestion, and reduce fuel consumption, which has a major social and economic value, thus it has become an important research direction and academic research hotspot of intelligent transportation systems. Aiming at the existing research results of the cooperative control of the vehicle platoon, this paper outlines the existing research methods and their advantages and disadvantages from four aspects, namely, vehicle platoon modeling, communication topology, cooperative control of single-vehicle platoons and platoon splitting/merging, platoon performance analysis. Furthermore, outlooks on the future research of the cooperative control of vehicle platoons are given, which provides guidance for the deeper research afterwards.