Variational Quantum Path Planning for Robotic Surgery

Minimally-invasive robotic surgery demands real-time, collision-free trajectory plan-ning through patient-specific 3D anatomy. Classical planners face exponentialcomplexity in cluttered environments, and we demonstrate that contemporary noisyintermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware can already contribute to solvingthis problem. We present a Variational Quantum Path Planner (VQPP) thatencodes surgical waypoint selection into a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Op-timisation (QUBO) problem, maps it to an Ising Hamiltonian, and executes aone-layer Quantum Approximate Optimisation Algorithm (QAOA) on IBM’s 156-qubit ibm_kingston processor.