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About

Yinliang Zhang is a leading researcher in extraterrestrial robotics and planetary regolith sampling, with a focus on bioinspired burrowing and drilling technologies for space exploration. His work directly supports China’s Chang’E 5 mission, which successfully returned subsurface lunar regolith samples in 2020. Zhang’s most cited paper, “Review on planetary regolith-sampling technology” (2021, 68 citations), provides a comprehensive overview of sampling techniques, while his “Review on Bioinspired Planetary Regolith-Burrowing Robots” (2021, 47 citations) explores nature-inspired designs for navigating granular extraterrestrial soils. His experimental study “Robotic drilling tests in simulated lunar regolith environment” (2021, 32 citations) validated key drilling concepts for the Chang’E 5 mission. Zhang has also pioneered mole-inspired burrowing robots (2024, 14 citations) that use forelimb-like mechanisms for efficient planetary soil exploration. Additionally, he has applied recurrent neural networks for real-time prediction of drilling forces in lunar regolith (2022, 13 citations) and investigated the influence of regolith compressibility on thick wall spiral drill performance (2021, 13 citations). His research extends to seafloor sediment sampling robots for marine investigation, demonstrating the versatility of his drilling and burrowing technologies. With over 190 total citations, Zhang’s work is foundational for future robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.