Swarm Robotics and Quantum Computing in Simulated Environments

Inspired by nature, robotic swarms can be dramatically helpful in search-and-rescue missions after natural or human-caused disasters, especially when the environmental conditions make dangerous the direct intervention of human rescuers. In this research, we focus on a simulated scene for a target-reaching mission, simulated on Webots, jointly with a recent quantum algorithm modeling pairwise interactions in a swarm. The platform Webots is known for its portability and free accessibility. Quantum computing offers new potentialities regarding efficiency and computational time, but its application to the robotic domain is a largely unexplored field. Here, we propose a connection between the IBM quantum simulators and the Webots platform, perform a comparison between a purely random procedure and the results obtained with the quantum circuit, and discuss possible future developments of the research.