The invention belongs to the technical field of unmanned aerial vehicles and bridge detection, and particularly relates to an automatic bridge detection method and system based on the cooperative operation of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles. The invention aims to solve the problems that the traditional bridge detection operation is difficult, the time required for a single drone is long, and theerror rate is high. The automatic bridge detection method and system based on the cooperative operation of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles comprises the following steps of: analyzing bridge environmental information and dividing the bridge detection task into a plurality of sub-tasks; obtaining a task clustering optimization function and dividing sub-task groups; planning unmanned aerial vehicle tracks corresponding to the sub-task groups separately and assigning the sub-task groups to the corresponding unmanned aerial vehicles; and transmitting photos taken by the unmanned aerial vehiclesto an image processing unit to extract the characteristics of bridge diseases and generate a bridge disease report. According to the invention, different shooting schemes are designed according to different bridge tasks; multiple unmanned aerial vehicles cooperate together to perform the bridge detection, and each unmanned aerial vehicle performs different sub-tasks; and anomaly remedy is performed by using the redundancy fault tolerance technology; therefore, the efficiency is high, the task continuity and integrity are good, the accuracy is high, and the error rate is low.