Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) that are considered as a subset of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) can be applied in the field of transportation especially in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The routing process in these networks is a challenging task due to rapid topology changes, high vehicle mobility and frequent disconnection of links. Therefore, developing an efficient routing protocol that satisfies restriction of delay and minimum overhead is faced with many difficulties and limitations. Also, the detection of malicious vehicles is a significant task in VANETs. To address these issues, using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be helpful to cope with these limitations. In this paper, operation of UAVs in ad hoc mode and their cooperation with vehicles in VANETs are studied to help in the process of routing and detection of malicious vehicles. A routing protocol named VRU is proposed that includes two distinct ways of routing of data: (1) delivering packets of data between vehicles with the help of UAVs using a protocol named VRU_vu, and (2) routing packet of data between UAVs using a protocol named VRU_u. The NS-2.35 simulator under Linux Ubuntu 12.04 is utilized in order to appraise the performance of VRU routing components in an urban scenario. Also, VanetMobiSim generator of mobility and MobiSim are used to produce the motions of vehicles and to produce the motions of UAVs, respectively. The performance analysis displays that VRU protocol can improve the packet delivery ratio by 16% and detection ratio by 7% compared to other reviewed routing protocol. Also, VRU protocol decreases end-to-end delay by an average of 13% and overhead by 40%.