Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm-based sensing technology has become increasingly important due to its exceptional maneuverability, versatile coverage capabilities, and reliable line-of-sight (LoS) connectivity. However, the sensing accuracy improvement by exploiting resource coordination strategy poses a new challenge on multi-UAV sensing system. In this paper, we consider the problem of cooperative sensing via a system of multi-UAV, where each UAV is equipped with a directional antenna to cooperatively conduct energy detection for several targets of interest. To measure the perception ability of the system, we choose the energy detection probability as the metric, aiming to maximize the sum detection probability of the network by jointly optimizing UAVs’ deployment, as well as the directional antenna orientations. By virtue of the specific problem structure, we recast the formulation into an equivalent yet more tractable form with the aid of auxiliary vectors. Subsequently, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm for the solution based on the alternating direction penalty method (ADPM), which decomposes the formulated non-convex problem into multiple subproblems and solves them alternately. Extensive simulations validate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm and provide valuable insights for practical system design.