  Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) dynamic encirclement is an emerging field
with great potential. Researchers often get inspiration from biological
systems, either from macro-world like fish schools or bird flocks etc, or from
micro-world like gene regulatory networks (GRN). However, most swarm control
algorithms rely on centralized control, global information acquisition, and
communications among neighboring agents. In this work, we propose a distributed
swarm control method based purely on vision and GRN without any direct
communications, in which swarm agents of e.g. UAVs can generate an entrapping
pattern to encircle an escaping target of UAV based purely on their installed
omnidirectional vision sensors. A finite-state-machine (FSM) describing the
behavioral model of each drone is also designed so that a swarm of drones can
accomplish searching and entrapping of the target collectively in an integrated
way. We verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method in
various simulation and real-world experiments.
