Can we use quantum mechanics to improve our abitlity to plan approximately in classical systems? To address this question, we develop tools to model and plan in a quantum system. We review fundamental quantum mechanical ideas needed to define a quantum model. We also review classical planning models and show how to generalize them to our quantum mechanical model (QuaMDP) which can also model quantum systems. Then we show one way to construct a QuaMDP model for a system given its potential energy. Using our new tools, we run some experiments and show that our QuaMDP model can approximately model some low dimensional classical systems well, qualitatively, and plan in them. However, it is still unclear whether planning in this model is simpler than in the classical case.

59 pages

Thesis Committee:
Geoff Gordon (Advisor)
Gary L. Miller

Frank Pfenning, Head, Computer Science Department
Andrew W. Moore, Dean, School of Computer Science

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