System and method for cooperative remote vehicle behavior

1. 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.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the remote vehicle behavior gathers data from sensors of the remote vehicle and outputs one or more motion commands.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the remote vehicle behavior includes one of person-following, obstacle-avoidance, door-breaching, u-turn, start/stop following and manual forward drive.

4. The method of claim 3 , wherein conflicts between remote vehicle behaviors are resolved by assigning unique priorities to each remote vehicle behavior.

5. The method of claim 4 , wherein commands from a low priority remote vehicle behavior are overridden by those from a high priority remote vehicle behavior.

6. The method of claim 1 , wherein voice commands are issued into a wireless headset worn by a human operator.

7. The method of claim 1 , further comprising utilizing speech synthesis to allow the remote vehicle to communicate with an operator in a natural way.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the remote vehicle behavior includes person following.

9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the trained statistical model is a trained Hidden Markov Model.

10. The method of claim 1 , comprising analyzing voice commands with speech recognition software.

11. The method of claim 1 , comprising creating image data from a camera.

12. The method of claim 11 , wherein the camera comprises a time-of-flight camera.

13. The method of claim 11 , wherein the camera comprises a 3D time-of-flight camera.

14. The method of claim 11 , wherein the camera comprises part of a stereo vision system.