  This study proposes a distributed algorithm that makes agents' adaptive
grouping entrap multiple targets via automatic decision making, smooth
flocking, and well-distributed entrapping. Agents make their own decisions
about which targets to surround based on environmental information. An improved
artificial potential field method is proposed to enable agents to smoothly and
naturally change the formation to adapt to the environment. The proposed
strategies guarantee that the coordination of swarm agents develops the
phenomenon of multiple targets entrapping at the swarm level. We validate the
performance of the proposed method using simulation experiments and design
indicators for the analysis of these simulation and physical experiments.
