Preface

The Quantum Robotics Group was founded in March 2015. The group met every weekend over the course of a year to discuss different emerging topics related to quantum robotics. This book is the product of our lecture series.

Computational speedups in planning for complex environments, faster learning algorithms, memory and power efficiency using qubit representation of data, and capability to manipulate quantum phenomena are only some of the many exciting possibilities in the emerging world of quantum robotics. Robotic systems are likely to benefit from quantum approaches in many ways.

Our book serves as a roadmap for the emerging field of quantum robotics, summarizing key recent advances in quantum science and engineering and discussing how these may be beneficial to robotics. We provide both a survey of the underlying theory (of quantum computing and quantum algorithms) as well as an overview of current experimental implementations being developed by academic and commercial research groups. Our aim is to provide a starting point for readers entering the world of quantum robotics and a guide for further exploration in sub-fields of interest. From reading our exposition, we hope that a better collective understanding of quantum robotics will emerge.

Chapter 1 introduces our work and framework. In Chapter 2, we provide background on relevant concepts in quantum mechanics and quantum computing that may be useful for quantum robotics. From there, the survey delves into key concepts in quantum search algorithms (Chapter 3) that are built on top of the quantum computing primitives. Speedups (and other algorithmic advantages) resulting from the quantum world are also investigated in the context of robot planning (Chapter 4), machine learning (Chapter 5), and robot controls and perception (Chapter 6). Our book also highlights some of the current implementations of quantum engineering mechanisms (Chapter 7) as well as current limitations. Finally, we conclude with a holistic summary of potential benefits to robotics from quantum mechanisms (Chapter 8).

We hope you enjoy this work and, from it, are inspired to delve more into the exciting emerging world of quantum robotics.

Prateek Tandon, Stanley Lam, Ben Shih, Tanay Mehta, Alex Mitev, and Zhiyang Ong January 2017