Quantum Robots Plus Environments
  A quantum robot is a mobile quantum system including an on bord quantum computer and ancillary systems, that interact with an environment of quantum systems. Quantum robots carry out tasks whose goals include carrying out measurements and physical experiments on the environment. Environments considered so far in the literature: oracles, data bases, and quantum registers, are shown to be special cases of environments considered here. It is noted that quantum robots should include a quantum computer and cannot be simply a multistate head. A model is discussed in which each task, as a sequence of computation and action phases, is described by a unitary step operator. Overall system dynamics is described in terms of a Feynman sum over paths of completed computation and action phases. A simple task example, measuring the distance between the quantum robot and a particle on a 1D space lattice, with quantum phase path and time duration dispersion present, is analyzed. 
Paul Benioff (Argonne National Laboratory)