[2603.00785] QANTIS: A Hardware-Validated Quantum Platform for POMDP Planning and Multi-Target Data Association

Quantum Physics arXiv:2603.00785 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 28 Feb 2026] Title:QANTIS: A Hardware-Validated Quantum Platform for POMDP Planning and Multi-Target Data Association Authors:Bayram Yüksel Eker, Suayb S. Arslan, Özgür Nazlı, Mustafa Serhat Demirgil, Furkan Deligöz View a PDF of the paper titled QANTIS: A Hardware-Validated Quantum Platform for POMDP Planning and Multi-Target Data Association, by Bayram Y\"uksel Eker and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Autonomous navigation under uncertainty requires solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) for planning and assigning sensor measurements to tracked targets--a task known as multi-target data association (MTDA). Both problems become computationally demanding at scale: belief conditioning costs $\mathcal{O}(P(e)^{-1})$ per node under rare evidence, while MTDA is NP-hard. Quantum amplitude amplification can quadratically reduce the belief-update query cost to $\mathcal{O}(P(e)^{-1/2})$, while QUBO reformulations expose MTDA to quantum and quantum-inspired optimisation heuristics. We present QANTIS, a modular platform that integrates quantum belief update (Grover amplitude amplification and BIQAE), QUBO-based data association via FPC-QAOA, and composable error mitigation, and we report a 45-experiment hardware study on three IBM Heron backends. On hardware, a single Grover iterate applied to a Tiger belief oracle amplifies a rare observation probability from $0.179$ to $0.907$...