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 arbitrary environment of quantum systems. Quantum robots carry out tasks whose goals include carrying out measurements or physical experiments on the environment. A dynamical 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=T a +T c (discrete space and time are assumed). The overall system dynamics is described as a sum over paths of completed computation (T c ) and action (T a ) 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.