Shibaura, Waseda partner with Fujitsu to control robot posture
By expressing the orientation and position of each robot link as a qubit, and by replicating the structural influence of parent joint movements on child joints through quantum entanglement, the number of necessary calculations was significantly reduced compared to conventional classical methods.
Japan’s Shibaura Institute of Technology, Waseda University, and Fujitsu have announced the development of an innovative method for efficiently controlling robot posture using quantum computing technology. This new approach facilitates the efficient and accurate calculation of inverse kinematics, i.e., determining joint angles from a target end-effector position, for multi-joint robots by leveraging qubit-based position representation and quantum entanglement, according to a media release.
Verification using Fujitsu’s quantum simulator achieved up to a 43% error reduction with fewer calculations compared to conventional methods. The effectiveness of quantum entanglement was also confirmed through an experiment carried out on the 64-qubit quantum computer jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu.
“By expressing the orientation and position of each robot link as a qubit, and by replicating the structural influence of parent joint movements on child joints through quantum entanglement, the number of necessary calculations was significantly reduced compared to conventional classical methods,” the media release said. “As quantum computing advances towards practical application, this development is expected to contribute substantially to the creation of next-generation robots that demand real-time control and complex operational capabilities.”
In robot posture control, calculating inverse kinematics is crucial. For robots with multiple joints, the possible angle combinations are numerous, requiring iterative calculations to minimize the discrepancy from the target position and resulting in a high computational load. For a full-body multi-joint model with 17 joints, equivalent to the number of joints in the human body, the number of possible calculations required are too vast to be solved directly. A common approach has been to perform motion calculations with an approximated 7 joints, but this limits the smoothness of movement.
In this research, a new method leveraging the power of quantum computing has been proposed to address these challenges. The orientation and position of each robot part are represented by qubits, and forward kinematics, i.e., calculation of end-effector position from joint angles, is carried out using quantum circuits. Inverse kinematics calculations are performed on classical computers, achieving efficient posture control through a hybrid quantum-classical approach.
Furthermore, by introducing quantum entanglement, the structure where the movement of parent joints naturally influences child joints is reproduced on the quantum circuit, the media release said.
