Pihai Sun

About Me

I am Pihai (Percy) Sun (孙丕海), a Ph.D. student at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). From 2019 to 2023, I studied at the College of Computer Science and Technology, Qingdao University, where I received my B.Eng. degree. From 2023 to 2026, I studied Electronic Information (Computer Technology) at the Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), where I received my M.S. degree under the supervision of Prof. Junjun Jiang. I am deeply grateful to Prof. Junjun Jiang for his invaluable guidance, unwavering support, and encouragement throughout my graduate studies.

My research is centered on robust 3D perception and embodied AI. I work on reliable geometric and semantic understanding from multimodal or degraded observations, and on deploying perception algorithms for humanoid robots. I am currently a research intern at Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center (X-Humanoid), where I work under the guidance of Qiang (Jony) Zhang on perception and perceptive locomotion.

Research Interests

My research is dedicated to building robust 3D perception systems that can recover reliable geometric and semantic understanding from imperfect multimodal observations, including images, events, point clouds, and degraded visual inputs. I aim to make perception reliable under challenging real-world conditions such as low light, motion blur, specular and transparent surfaces, sparse sensing, and domain shifts.

For embodied AI, I am particularly interested in connecting perception with action: enabling humanoid robots to perceive traversable structure, reason about complex terrain, build multimodal occupancy representations, and use these signals for closed-loop locomotion and real-world autonomy.

News

• [2026] Our papers SOLO and MeshMimic are accepted to CoRL 2026.
• [2026] At the World Humanoid Robot Games, Tiangong Omni robots powered by our perceptive-locomotion technology won gold and bronze in the 400 m obstacle course and silver in the 100 m obstacle course.
• [2026] At the World Robot Conference (WRC 2026), Tiangong Omni publicly demonstrated our perceptive-locomotion technology by traversing stepping stones and stairs in front of a live audience.
• [2026] We released Omni, a breakthrough humanoid robot platform for robust perceptive locomotion. I developed its perceptive-locomotion capability, enabling 15-minute stable walking in randomized urban scenes, one-shot ascent of 17 indoor fire-stair floors, and robust traversal of compound terrain.
• [2026] The group standard T/CAMETA 001112-2026, Evaluation Specification for Image and Graphics Intelligence of Embodied Intelligent Robots, to which I contributed, was released by the China Mechatronics Technology Application Association.
• [2026] Three preprints on humanoid robot perception (RobotPan, Heracles, MeshMimic) are released.
• [2025] At the inaugural Humanoid Robot Games, our team won the 100 m running championship with an autonomous strategy, and earned second place in the 4x100 m relay, 1500 m, and 400 m events. Under the guidance of Shuai Shi, I contributed to the perception algorithms.
• [2025] Our team won 2nd place in the TRICKY 2025 Challenge on monocular depth from specular and transparent surfaces at ICCV 2025 Workshops.
• [2025] Our paper FUSE is accepted to IROS 2025.
• [2024] Our team won 2nd place in the Compressed Depth Map Super-Resolution and Restoration Challenge at the AIM 2024 Workshop, ECCV 2024.

Honors and Awards

• 2nd Place, Compressed Depth Map Super-Resolution and Restoration Challenge, AIM 2024 Workshop, ECCV 2024. Associated paper: Compressed Depth Map Super-Resolution and Restoration: AIM 2024 Challenge Results, Computer Vision – ECCV 2024 Workshops, Springer, 2025, pp. 287-303.
• 2nd Place, Monocular Depth from Images of Specular and Transparent Surfaces Challenge, TRICKY 2025 Workshop, ICCV 2025. Associated paper: TRICKY 2025 Challenge on Monocular Depth from Images of Specular and Transparent Surfaces, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2025, pp. 3311-3322.
• Harbin Institute of Technology Special Academic Scholarship.
• Shandong Province Outstanding Graduate, 2023.
• First-Class Academic Scholarship, Qingdao University.

Publications

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