Quantum Robots Plus Environments

Abstract

A quantum robot is a mobile quantum system, including an on board quantum computer and needed ancillary systems, that interacts with an environment of quantum systems. Quantum robots carry out tasks whose goals include making specified changes in the state of the environment or carrying out measurements on the environment. The environments considered so far, oracles, data bases, and quantum registers, are seen to be special cases of environments considered here. It is also seen that a quantum robot should include a quantum computer and cannot be simply a multistate head.A model of quantum robots and their interactions is discussed in which each task, as a sequence of alternating computation and action phases,is described by a unitary single time step operator T = Ta + Tc (discrete space and time are assumed). The overall system dynamics is described as a sum over paths of completed computation (Tc) and action (Ta) phases. A simple example of a task, measuring the distance between the quantum robot and a particle on a 1D lattice with quantum phase path dispersion present, is analyzed. A decision diagram for the task is presented and analyzed.