Quantum Polynomial Functors

We construct a category of quantum polynomial functors which deforms Friedlander and Suslin's category of strict polynomial functors. The main aim of this paper is to develop from first principles the basic structural properties of this category (duality, projective generators, braiding etc.) in analogy with classical strict polynomial functors. We then apply the work of Hashimoto and Hayashi in this context to construct quantum Schur/Weyl functors, and use this to provide new and easy derivations of quantum $(GL_m,GL_n)$ duality, along with other results in quantum invariant theory.