In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer within the U.S. Air Force, set out on a coaching mission to evaluate harm at an airfield runway, working towards “base recovery” protocol after a simulated assault. For hours, his workforce walked over the world in chemical safety gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented harm and seemed for threats like unexploded munitions.
The work is normal for all Air Force engineers earlier than they deploy, nevertheless it held particular significance for Pietersen, who has spent the final 5 years growing sooner, safer approaches for assessing airfields as a grasp’s scholar and now a PhD candidate and MathWorks Fellow at MIT. For Pietersen, the time-intensive, painstaking, and probably harmful work underscored the potential for his analysis to allow distant airfield assessments.
“That experience was really eye-opening,” Pietersen says. “We’ve been told for almost a decade that a new, drone-based system is in the works, but it is still limited by an inability to identify unexploded ordnances; from the air, they look too much like rocks or debris. Even ultra-high-resolution cameras just don’t perform well enough. Rapid and remote airfield assessment is not the standard practice yet. We’re still only prepared to do this on foot, and that’s where my research comes in.”
Pietersen’s aim is to create drone-based automated techniques for assessing airfield harm and detecting unexploded munitions. This has taken him down a lot of 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 spread of purposes together with agriculture, emergency response, mining, and constructing assessments.
Finding laptop science and neighborhood
Growing up in a suburb of Sacramento, California, Pietersen gravitated towards math and physics in class. But he was additionally a cross nation athlete and an Eagle Scout, and he wished a solution to put his pursuits collectively.
“I liked the multifaceted challenge the Air Force Academy presented,” Pietersen says. “My family doesn’t have a history of serving, but the recruiters talked about the holistic education, where academics were one part, but so was athletic fitness and leadership. That well-rounded approach to the college experience appealed to me.”
Pietersen majored in civil engineering as an undergrad on the Air Force Academy, the place he first started studying how one can conduct educational analysis. This required him to study slightly little bit of laptop programming.
“In my senior year, the Air Force research labs had some pavement-related projects that fell into my scope as a civil engineer,” Pietersen recollects. “While my domain knowledge helped define the initial problems, it was very clear that developing the right solutions would require a deeper understanding of computer vision and remote sensing.”
The initiatives, which handled airfield pavement assessments and risk 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 clear choice for my research because the school has such a strong history of research partnerships and multidisciplinary thinking that helps you solve these unconventional problems,” Pietersen says. “There’s no better place in the world than MIT for cutting-edge work like this.”
By the time Pietersen acquired to MIT, he’d additionally embraced excessive sports activities like ultra-marathons, skydiving, and mountaineering. Some of that stemmed from his participation in infantry abilities competitions as an undergrad. The multiday competitions are military-focused races wherein groups from all over the world traverse mountains and carry out graded actions like tactical fight casualty care, orienteering, and marksmanship.
“The crowd I ran with in college was really into that stuff, so it was sort of a natural consequence of relationship-building,” Pietersen says. “These events would run you around for 48 or 72 hours, sometimes with some sleep mixed in, and you get to compete with your buddies and have a good time.”
Since coming to MIT together with his spouse and two kids, Pietersen has embraced the native operating neighborhood and even labored as an indoor skydiving teacher in New Hampshire, although he admits the East Coast winters have been powerful 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 fact of airfield assessments passed off in Florida, and then he was deployed to Saudi Arabia. He occurred to jot down certainly one 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 fun exploring all sorts of different engineering disciplines, trying to figure things out with the help of all the mentors at MIT and the resources available to work on these really niche problems,” Pietersen says.
Research with a goal
In the summer season of 2020, Pietersen did an internship with the HALO Trust, a humanitarian group working to clear landmines and different explosives from areas impacted by battle. The expertise demonstrated one other highly effective utility for his work at MIT.
“We have post-conflict regions around the world where kids are trying to play and there are landmines and unexploded ordnances in their backyards,” Pietersen says. “Ukraine is a good example of this in the news today. There are always remnants of war left behind. Right now, people have to go into these potentially dangerous areas and clear them, but new remote-sensing techniques could speed that process up and make it far safer.”
Although Pietersen’s grasp’s work primarily revolved round assessing regular put on and tear of pavement buildings, his PhD has centered on methods to detect unexploded ordnances and extra extreme harm.
“If the runway is attacked, there would be bombs and craters all over it,” Pietersen says. “This makes for a challenging environment to assess. Different types of sensors extract different kinds of information and each has its pros and cons. There is still a lot of work to be done on both the hardware and software side of things, but so far, hyperspectral data appears to be a promising discriminator for deep learning object detectors.”
After commencement, Pietersen shall be stationed in Guam, the place Air Force engineers repeatedly carry out the identical airfield evaluation simulations he participated in in Florida. He hopes sometime quickly, these assessments shall be carried out not by people in protecting gear, however by drones.
“Right now, we rely on visible lines of site,” Pietersen says. “If we can move to spectral imaging and deep-learning solutions, we can finally conduct remote assessments that make everyone safer.”