In early 2021, the team arrived in neighboring Hebei province to maintain the power supply in response to the rapidly spreading epidemic.

His team swiftly arrived in Zhengzhou, Henan province after a flood on July 20 last year and worked for more than 10 days to restore the power.

In terms of innovations, Zhang has earned 200 national-level patents and made 500 technological breakthroughs.

A major one is a kind of new robot capable of performing maintenance work on the electrical grid. In the past, engineers working on site faced risks if the electricity was on.

To date, the robots have been widely used in more than 20 provincial-level regions across China in 17,000 projects, breaking the monopoly of Western companies.

Other AI-based robots also include power-charging robots at the driver-less bus stops in China-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City, and the country's first batch of robots to offer charging services to passenger cars in different parking spots simultaneously.

To date, 63 innovation workshops with 2,000 blue-collar innovators in the company are working with him.

Currently, Zhang is leading his counterparts to research cloud computing, big data, internet of things, mobile internet and AI.

"We are trying to speed up their applications on the traditional power sector and expect more breakthroughs in robots," he said.