This paper presents a bio-inspired controller capable of controlling a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to provide a visual representation of an invisible airborne hazardous substance such as a chemical cloud. By using this approach, the position of the individuals in the swarm of UAVs forms a distribution map without the need for transmitting sensor data to a base station for chemical map generation. A behaviour-based approach is adopted to develop this controller so that it is computationally cheap and highly effective, compared to other coverage methods such as Voronoi partition or simulated annealing. Simulation results show that the approach is highly responsive to dynamic changes in the environment.
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