System and method for cooperative remote vehicle behavior

A method for facilitating cooperation between humans and remote vehicles, the method comprising:

• creating a scene image including 3D point cloud data;
• connecting components within the scene image to extract all large solid objects from the scene image using the point cloud data;
• executing a support vector machine trained on a shape of a human to identify a human shape among the large solid objects within the scene image;
• extracting gesture information of observed poses of human arms from the human shape using a trained statistical model trained on poses of human arms in scene images, the gesture information corresponding to at least one remote vehicle motion command to control a remote vehicle behavior;
• scoring the gesture information relative to a set of known gestures;
• when a sequence of gesture information matches a complete sequence associated with a known gesture, mapping the at least one remote vehicle motion command to one or more remote vehicle behaviors;
• and
• activating the one or more remote vehicle behaviors.