Quantum algorithms to simulate quadratic classical Hamiltonians and optimal control

Simulation of realistic classical mechanical systems is of great importance to many areas of engineering such as robotics, dynamics of rotating machinery and control theory. In this work, we develop quantum algorithms to estimate quantities of interest such as the kinetic energy in a given classical mechanical system in the presence of friction or damping as well as forcing or source terms, which makes the algorithm of practical interest. We show that for such systems, the quantum algorithm scales polynomially with the logarithm of the dimension of the system. We cast this problem in terms of Hamilton's equations of motion (equivalent to the first variation of the Lagrangian) and solve them using quantum algorithms for differential equations. We then consider the hardness of estimating the kinetic energy of a damped coupled oscillator system. We show that estimating the kinetic energy at a given time of this system to within additive precision is BQP hard when the strength of the damping term is bounded by an inverse polynomial in the number of qubits. We then consider the problem of designing optimal control of classical systems, which can be cast as the second variation of the Lagrangian. In this direction, we first consider the Riccati equation, which is a nonlinear differential equation ubiquitous in control theory. We give an efficient quantum algorithm to solve the Riccati differential equation well into the nonlinear regime. To our knowledge, this is the first example of any nonlinear differential equation that can be solved when the strength of the nonlinearity is asymptotically greater than the amount of dissipation. We then show how to use this algorithm to solve the linear quadratic regulator problem, which is an example of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.