A cooperative navigation architecture for the search and recognition of targets using aerial and ground vehicles is proposed in this paper. Two main tasks are conceived; an aerial monitoring of a surface for searching targets, and a target ground recognition. First, the aerial drone tracks autonomously a trajectory, computed to cover all the surface to monitor, to search for targets using vision algorithms. Once detected, its relative position is sent to the cooperative architecture. After the aerial drone has covered the entire area, the architecture computes and assigns to each ground vehicle the closest target found. Then, each ground vehicle navigates autonomously avoiding obstacles to its assigned target. To verify the success of the mission, the aerial vehicle flies over the dynamic center of mass of the ground vehicles. Real-time experiments are carried out to validate the proposed architecture. Main results, depicted in some graphs, corroborate the good performance in closed loop.