In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer within the U.S. Air Power, set out on a coaching mission to evaluate harm at an airfield runway, practising “base restoration” protocol after a simulated assault. For hours, his workforce walked over the realm in chemical safety gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented harm and regarded for threats like unexploded munitions.
The work is customary for all Air Power engineers earlier than they deploy, however it held particular significance for Pietersen, who has spent the final 5 years growing sooner, safer approaches for assessing airfields as a grasp’s pupil and now a PhD candidate and MathWorks Fellow at MIT. For Pietersen, the time-intensive, painstaking, and doubtlessly harmful work underscored the potential for his analysis to allow distant airfield assessments.
“That have was actually eye-opening,” Pietersen says. “We’ve been advised for nearly a decade {that a} new, drone-based system is within the works, however it’s nonetheless restricted by an incapacity to establish unexploded ordnances; from the air, they give the impression of being an excessive amount of like rocks or particles. Even ultra-high-resolution cameras simply don’t carry out effectively sufficient. Fast and distant airfield evaluation just isn’t the usual follow but. We’re nonetheless solely ready to do that on foot, and that’s the place my analysis is available in.”
Pietersen’s aim is to create drone-based automated techniques for assessing airfield harm and detecting unexploded munitions. This has taken him down quite a few analysis paths, from deep studying to small uncrewed aerial techniques to “hyperspectral” imaging, which captures passive electromagnetic radiation throughout a broad spectrum of wavelengths. Hyperspectral imaging is getting cheaper, sooner, and extra sturdy, which might make Pietersen’s analysis more and more helpful in a variety of purposes together with agriculture, emergency response, mining, and constructing assessments.
Discovering laptop science and neighborhood
Rising up in a suburb of Sacramento, California, Pietersen gravitated towards math and physics in class. However he was additionally a cross nation athlete and an Eagle Scout, and he wished a option to put his pursuits collectively.
“I appreciated the multifaceted problem the Air Power Academy introduced,” Pietersen says. “My household doesn’t have a historical past of serving, however the recruiters talked in regards to the holistic schooling, the place teachers had been one half, however so was athletic health and management. That well-rounded strategy to the faculty expertise appealed to me.”
Pietersen majored in civil engineering as an undergrad on the Air Power Academy, the place he first started studying tips on how to conduct tutorial analysis. This required him to be taught slightly little bit of laptop programming.
“In my senior yr, the Air Power analysis labs had some pavement-related tasks that fell into my scope as a civil engineer,” Pietersen recollects. “Whereas my area information helped outline the preliminary issues, it was very clear that growing the proper options would require a deeper understanding of laptop imaginative and prescient and distant sensing.”
The tasks, which handled airfield pavement assessments and menace detection, additionally led Pietersen to begin utilizing hyperspectral imaging and machine studying, which he constructed on when he got here to MIT to pursue his grasp’s and PhD in 2020.
“MIT was a transparent selection for my analysis as a result of the varsity has such a powerful historical past of analysis partnerships and multidisciplinary considering that helps you remedy these unconventional issues,” Pietersen says. “There’s no higher place on the earth than MIT for cutting-edge work like this.”
By the point Pietersen obtained to MIT, he’d additionally embraced excessive sports activities like ultra-marathons, skydiving, and mountain climbing. A few of that stemmed from his participation in infantry abilities competitions as an undergrad. The multiday competitions are military-focused races through which groups from world wide traverse mountains and carry out graded actions like tactical fight casualty care, orienteering, and marksmanship.
“The group I ran with in school was actually into that stuff, so it was kind of a pure consequence of relationship-building,” Pietersen says. “These occasions would run you round for 48 or 72 hours, typically with some sleep combined in, and also you get to compete along with your buddies and have a very good time.”
Since coming to MIT together with his spouse and two youngsters, Pietersen has embraced the native working neighborhood and even labored as an indoor skydiving teacher in New Hampshire, although he admits the East Coast winters have been robust for him and his household to regulate to.
Pietersen went distant between 2022 to 2024, however he wasn’t doing his analysis from the consolation of a house workplace. The coaching that confirmed him the truth of airfield assessments happened in Florida, after which he was deployed to Saudi Arabia. He occurred to write down one in every of his PhD journal publications from a tent within the desert.
Now again at MIT and nearing the completion of his doctorate this spring, Pietersen is grateful for all of the individuals who have supported him in all through his journey.
“It has been enjoyable exploring all kinds of various engineering disciplines, making an attempt to determine issues out with the assistance of all of the mentors at MIT and the assets obtainable to work on these actually area of interest issues,” Pietersen says.
Analysis with a function
In the summertime of 2020, Pietersen did an internship with the HALO Belief, a humanitarian group working to clear landmines and different explosives from areas impacted by struggle. The expertise demonstrated one other highly effective utility for his work at MIT.
“We’ve post-conflict areas world wide the place youngsters are attempting to play and there are landmines and unexploded ordnances of their backyards,” Pietersen says. “Ukraine is an efficient instance of this within the information right now. There are at all times remnants of struggle left behind. Proper now, folks have to enter these doubtlessly harmful areas and clear them, however new remote-sensing methods might velocity that course of up and make it far safer.”
Though Pietersen’s grasp’s work primarily revolved round assessing regular put on and tear of pavement buildings, his PhD has targeted on methods to detect unexploded ordnances and extra extreme harm.
“If the runway is attacked, there can be bombs and craters throughout it,” Pietersen says. “This makes for a difficult surroundings to evaluate. Various kinds of sensors extract completely different varieties of knowledge and every has its execs and cons. There may be nonetheless loads of work to be executed on each the {hardware} and software program aspect of issues, however thus far, hyperspectral knowledge seems to be a promising discriminator for deep studying object detectors.”
After commencement, Pietersen shall be stationed in Guam, the place Air Power engineers frequently carry out the identical airfield evaluation simulations he participated in in Florida. He hopes sometime quickly, these assessments shall be executed not by people in protecting gear, however by drones.
“Proper now, we depend on seen traces of website,” Pietersen says. “If we are able to transfer to spectral imaging and deep-learning options, we are able to lastly conduct distant assessments that make everybody safer.”
