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About

Hongyan Tang is a robotics researcher whose work bridges aerial manipulation, rehabilitation engineering, and reconfigurable mechanisms. Their key contributions span three domains: adaptive landing gear systems for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, wearable exoskeletons for human motion assistance, and innovative self-balancing mobile robots. Tang’s most impactful work, a multi-finger robot system for adaptive landing gear and aerial manipulation (35 citations), demonstrates how parallel mechanisms can enable aircraft to land on uneven terrain while performing in-flight tasks. Their design of a reconfigurable two-wheeled self-balancing robot (18 citations) introduces a virtual equivalent parallel mechanism that expands the robot’s controllable tilt range—a breakthrough for applications in security and rescue. In rehabilitation robotics, Tang’s sagittal-plane knee exoskeleton with a remote-center-of-motion mechanism (14 citations) optimizes joint alignment for safer human-robot interaction, while their ankle rehabilitation robot (2 citations) addresses the growing need for automated therapy in aging populations. Tang’s work exemplifies how parallel mechanism theory can be creatively applied to solve real-world problems in robotics, from aircraft landing gear to clinical rehabilitation.