Reduced costs of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) including sensors combined with increased on-board computational power expand the area of application of UAS from strictly military operations to civil emergency and disaster management. The SkyObserver project is aimed to develop a tool for emergency management based on an autonomous swarm to deal with various tasks in the case of a civil hazard. In these and similar tasks the deployment and exploration problems are critical challenges in the coordination and path planning of an autonomous swarm. Additionally robustness and scalability requirements have to be taken into account. This paper gives an overview of available and suitable methods and algorithms solving the deployment and exploration problems in context of civil operations. Simulation results show the capabilities as well as robustness and scalability of the selected methods. © 2011 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.