Quantum Robotics: A Primer on Current Science and Future Perspectives (Synthesis Lectures on Quantum Computing)

Quantum robotics is an emerging engineering and scientific research discipline that explores the application of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, quantum algorithms, and related fields to robotics. This work broadly surveys advances in our scientific understanding and engineering of quantum mechanisms and how these developments are expected to impact the technical capability for robots to sense, plan, learn, and act in a dynamic environment. It also discusses the new technological potential that quantum approaches may unlock for sensing and control, especially for exploring and manipulating quantum-scale environments. Finally, the work surveys the state of the art in current implementations, along with their benefits and limitations, and provides a roadmap for the future.

Prateek Tandon is the founder of the Quantum Robotics Group. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and his B.S. in Computer Engineering, Computer Science from the University of Southern California. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on Bayesian methods for sensor fusion and extracting structure from multiple noisy data observations. Having previously written on optimizing many classical machine learning methods for robotic sensing, improving fault tolerance and runtime scalability, Prateek's research interests include exploring the new possibilities that quantum methods and quantum machine learning hold for robotic perception, learning, and planning.