About Me
Hi, I am Qihang Li, a PhD student in Computer Science at North Carolina State University, advised by Dr. Peng Gao in the CoRob Lab. Before NC State, I earned my MSE in Robotics from Johns Hopkins University and my BEng in Mechatronics and Robotics System from a joint program between Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) and the University of Liverpool.
News
- Two papers submitted to ICRA 2027. I will also attend IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh.
- IROS 2026: Our paper on communication-efficient relative pose estimation for ephemeral collaborative perception (CERPE) was accepted. See the project page and paper.
Research Interests
My research focuses on robot collaboration: enabling robots to work with teammates, both other robots and humans, through perception, task allocation, and coordinated task execution. I draw on large-scale pre-trained models, learning-based perception, and planning to operate under uncertainty and limited communication. I am also passionate about making my algorithms run reliably and efficiently on real robots, and I have deployed my work on quadrupeds, manipulators, mobile manipulators, and wheeled platforms.
Recent work includes communication-efficient relative pose estimation for collaborative perception (project page), and task coordination for hybrid robot teams.
Background
Before joining the CoRob Lab, I worked on robot planning and learning at the Spatial AI and Robotics (SAIR) Lab at the University at Buffalo, contributing to PyPose and iKap. At Duke University, I worked on medical image analysis in the Mazurowski Lab, including large-scale pre-trained models for MRI. At the Laboratory of Biomechanical and Image Guided Surgical Systems (BIGSS) at Johns Hopkins, I worked on sensing and perception for continuum manipulators in medical robotics.
Selected Publications
Qihang Li, Yixuan Huang, Tom Silver, Peng Gao. Skeleton-Conditioned Base Placement Evaluation for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation. Preprint. [paper]
Haoyu Dong, Yuwen Chen, Hanxue Gu, Nicholas Konz, Yaqian Chen, Qihang Li, Maciej A. Mazurowski. MRI-CORE: A Foundation Model for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Preprint. [paper]
Qihang Li, Jo-Hao Huang, Jiewen Liu, Suyoung Kang, Hao Zhang, Peng Gao. Communication-Efficient Relative Pose Estimation with Vision Foundation Models for Ephemeral Collaborative Perception. International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026. [website] [paper]
Qihang Li, Zhuoqun Chen, Haoze Zheng, Haonan He, Zitong Zhan, Shaoshu Su, Junyi Geng, Chen Wang. iKap: Kinematics-aware Planning with Imperative Learning. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025. [website] [paper]
Chen Wang, Kaiyi Ji, Junyi Geng, …, Qihang Li, …, Zhipeng Zhao. Imperative Learning: A Self-supervised Neural-Symbolic Learning Framework for Robot Autonomy. The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2025. [paper]
Qihang Li, W. Wang, J. Liu, A. Jain, M. Armand. Data-driven Shape Sensing of Continuum Dexterous Manipulators Using Embedded Capacitive Sensor. IEEE Sensors, 2023. Top 5% of the accepted papers. [paper]
The full list is on the Publications page and my Google Scholar profile.