Experimental environment.

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the use of UAV-based data collection systems has become a very popular research topic. This paper focuses on the energy consumption problem of this system. Genetic algorithms and swarm algorithms are effective approaches for solving this problem. However, optimizing UAV energy consumption remains a challenging task due to the inherent characteristics of these algorithms, which make it difficult to achieve the optimum solution. In this paper, a novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm called Double Self-Limiting PSO (DSLPSO) is proposed to minimize the energy consumption of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). DSLPSO refers to the operational principle of PSO and incorporates two new mechanisms. The first mechanism is to restrict the particle movement, improving the local search capability of the algorithm. The second mechanism dynamically adjusts the search range, which improves the algorithm’s global search capability. DSLPSO employs a variable population strategy that treats the entire population as a single mission plan for the UAV and dynamically adjusts the number of stopping points. In addition, the proposed algorithm was also simulated using public and random datasets. The effectiveness of the proposed DSLPSO and the two new mechanisms has been verified through experiments. The DSLPSO algorithm can effectively improve the lifetime of the UAV, and the two newly proposed mechanisms have potential for optimization work.