IonQ announced the next stages of its partnership with Hyundai Motor Company to develop the vehicles of the future. Hyundai Motor Company and IonQ will work to develop on IonQ’s quantum computers machine vision algorithms capable of conducting object detection on three dimensional data from autonomous vehicles.

Additionally, the two companies will also utilize IonQ’s quantum computers to simulate electrochemical reactions of varying metal catalysts. The new projects build upon previous work between the two companies and further the role quantum computers have in developing the smart, environmentally friendly vehicles of the future.

Ongoing research between IonQ and Hyundai has the two companies applying quantum machine learning to image processing, where images—such as road signs—are encoded into a quantum state for classification and object detection. The initial success of these early projects has led Hyundai to pursue additional joint research with IonQ on a number of new techniques.

Of particular interest in this new endeavor is the analysis of spatial and environmental data from lidar and other sensors, which could improve vehicles’ understanding of the nature and location of objects, people, and environment around them. Quantum machine learning techniques being investigated at IonQ have shown the potential to learn faster, be more effective in recognizing edge cases, generalize better, learn from lower resolution or noisy data, and capture complex correlations with a far lower number of parameters. These deep technical advantages can ultimately lead to quicker, safer and more accurate decisions without user input.

Additionally, Hyundai’s earlier efforts to study lithium compounds and the chemical reactions involved in battery chemistry has led the group to expand its current scope and explore new metal catalyst chemical reactions for future vehicles. The collective insights and knowledge gained from the quantum simulations will enable Hyundai engineers to potentially develop higher-performance EVs at reduced costs.

At the Q2B conference in Santa Clara, IonQ is presenting results from its advanced battery chemistry model project with Hyundai (Zhao et al.). The results showcase the advantages of quantum computing in studying lithium compounds involved in next-generation electric vehicle battery chemical reactions, and how quantum computing is an effective tool for chemistry simulation.

The new Hyundai projects closely follow IonQ’s recent announcement that it secured a $13.4-million contract to supply the US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) with access to its trapped ion systems for quantum computing hardware research and for the development of quantum algorithms and applications.

Other commercial partnerships to have materialized in recent months include Airbus, GE Research, and Goldman Sachs, among others. Additionally, IonQ’s Aria system is the most powerful commercially available quantum system in the market with an industry-leading 25 algorithmic qubits.

Resources

• Luning Zhao, Joshua Goings, Kenneth Wright, Jason Nguyen, Jungsang Kim, Sonika Johri, Kyujin Shin, Woomin Kyoung, Johanna I. Fuks, June-Koo Kevin Rhee, Young Min Rhee (2022) “Orbital-optimized pair-correlated electron simulations on trapped-ion quantum computers” doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2212.02482