Controlling complex dynamic systems requires skills that operators oft
en cannot completely describe, but can demonstrate. This paper is conc
erned with the problem of transferring human control skill to an autom
atic controller The process of reconstructing a skill from an operator
's behavioural traces by means of machine learning (ML) techniques is
called ''behavioural cloning''. The paper gives a review of ML techniq
ues applied to behavioural cloning, a number of representative experim
ents, and an assessment of the results. Some recent work is discussed,
including a way of combining skill from several operators. (C) 1997 E
lsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.