This paper presents an attempt to transform PSO into a self-adaptive algorithm based on specific swarm-inspired operators. New features are introduced: spatial expansion intended to overcome premature convergence (an algorithm called Improved PSO, IPSO) and auto-adaptation (an algorithm called Adaptive PSO, APSO). Experiments show that APSO and IPSO outperform the basic PSO on benchmark problems, proving their efficiency especially on multimodal functions.