Robotics Meets Quantum Computing

(CosmosMagazine) Australian physicists from the University of Sydney say they have adapted techniques from autonomous vehicles and robotics to efficiently assess the performance of quantum devices.
The team reports that its new approach has been shown experimentally to outperform simplistic characterisation of these environments by a factor of three, with a much higher result for more complex simulated environments.
The took techniques from classical estimation used in robotics and adapted them to improve hardware performance. This is achieved through the efficient automation of processes that map both the environment of and performance variations across large quantum devices “Our idea was to adapt algorithms used in robotics that map the environment and place an object relative to other objects in their estimated terrain,” says Riddhi Guptasays.
“We effectively use some qubits in the device as sensors to help understand the classical terrain in which other qubits are processing information.” In robotics, Gupta says, machines rely on simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) algorithms. Devices like robotic vacuum cleaners are continuously mapping their environments then estimating their location within that environment in order to move.