Navigation of Quantum-Controlled Mobile Robots

Abstract

The actions of autonomous mobile robots in stochastic medium imply certain intellectual behavior, which allows fulfilling the mission in spite of the environmental uncertainty and the robot’s influence on the characteristics of the medium. To provide such a behavior, the controllers of the robots are considered as probabilistic automata with decision-making and, in some cases, learning abilities. General studies in this direction began in the 1960s (Fu & Li, 1969; Tsetlin, 1973) and resulted in practical methods of on-line decision-making and navigation of mobile robots (Unsal, 1998; Kagan & Ben-Gal, 2008). Along with the indicated studies, in recent years, the methods of mobile robot’s navigation and control are considered in the framework of quantum computation (Nielsen & Chuang, 2000), which gave rise to the concept of quantum mobile robot (Benioff, 1998; Dong, et al., 2006). Such approach allowed including both an environmental influence on the robot’s actions and the changes of the environment by the robot by the use of the same model, and the ability to apply the methods of quantum communication and decision-making (Levitin, 1969; Helstrom, 1976; Davies, 1978; Holevo, 2001) to the mobile robot’s control. Following Benioff, quantum robots are “mobile systems that have a quantum computer and any other needed ancillary systems on board... Quantum robots move in and interact (locally) with environments of quantum systems” (Benioff, 1998). If, in contrast, the quantum robots interact with a non-quantum environment, then they are considered as quantum-controlled mobile robots. According to Perkowski, these robots are such that “their controls are quantum but sensors and effectors are classical” (Raghuvanshi, et al., 2007). In the other words, in the quantum-controlled mobile robot, the input data obtained by classical (non-quantum) sensors are processed by the use of quantum-mechanical methods, and the results are output to classical (non-quantum) effectors. In this chapter, we present a brief practical introduction into quantum computation and information theory and consider the methods of path planning and navigation of quantumcontrolled mobile robots based on quantum decision-making.