Basic Concepts of Bayesian Programming

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce gently the basics concepts of Bayesian Programming. After a short formal introduction of Bayesian Programming, we present these concepts using three simple experiments with the mini mobile robot Khepera. These three instances have been selected among the numerous experiments done with this robots for their simplicity and didactic quality. A more extensive description of the work done with Khepera may be found in a paper of Advanced Robotics [Lebeltel et al., 2004] or, in even greater details, in the PhD thesis of Olivier Lebeltel (Lebeltel [1999] in french). We also propose a presentation of the technical issues related to Bayesian Programming: inference principles and algorithms and programming language. We keep this part very short as these technical questions, even if they are very interesting, are not central to this book.