Target searching in complex unknown environments is a challenging aspect of multi-robot cooperation. In this paper, an improved particle swarm optimisation (PSO) based approach is proposed for a team of mobile robots to cooperatively search for targets in complex unknown environments. The improved cooperation rules for a multi-robot system are applied in the potential field function, which acts as the fitness function of the PSO. The main improvements are the district-difference degree and dynamic parameter tuning. In the simulation studies, various complex situations are investigated and compared to the previous research results. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can enable the multi-robot system to accomplish the target searching tasks in complex unknown environments.