In order to improve the performance of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), an adaptive range PSO with the Cauchy distributed population named ARPSO/C was proposed. The algorithm used the median and scale parameters to adjust self-adaptively the search range in population under the suppose of the individuals obeying the Cauchy distribution, thus balanced between local search and global search. The numerical comparison results on the proposed algorithm, ARPSO and PSO show that the presented algorithm has higher convergence speed and can overcome the prematurity.