In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer within the U.S. Air Pressure, set out on a coaching mission to evaluate harm at an airfield runway, working towards “base restoration” protocol after a simulated assault. For hours, his crew walked over the realm 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 Pressure engineers earlier than they deploy, however it held particular significance for Pietersen, who has spent the final 5 years creating 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 incapability to determine unexploded ordnances; from the air, they appear 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 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 purpose is to create drone-based automated techniques for assessing airfield harm and detecting unexploded munitions. This has taken him down various 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 may make Pietersen’s analysis more and more helpful in a spread of functions together with agriculture, emergency response, mining, and constructing assessments.
Discovering laptop science and group
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 needed a strategy to put his pursuits collectively.
“I appreciated the multifaceted problem the Air Pressure Academy introduced,” Pietersen says. “My household doesn’t have a historical past of serving, however the recruiters talked concerning the holistic schooling, the place lecturers had been one half, however so was athletic health and management. That well-rounded method to the faculty expertise appealed to me.”
Pietersen majored in civil engineering as an undergrad on the Air Pressure Academy, the place he first started studying how one can conduct tutorial analysis. This required him to study a little bit little bit of laptop programming.
“In my senior yr, the Air Pressure analysis labs had some pavement-related tasks that fell into my scope as a civil engineer,” Pietersen remembers. “Whereas my area data helped outline the preliminary issues, it was very clear that creating the suitable options would require a deeper understanding of laptop imaginative and prescient and distant sensing.”
The tasks, 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 transparent alternative for my analysis as a result of the varsity has such a robust historical past of analysis partnerships and multidisciplinary considering that helps you clear up these unconventional issues,” Pietersen says. “There’s no higher place on this planet than MIT for cutting-edge work like this.”
By the point Pietersen acquired 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 expertise 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 gang I ran with in faculty was actually into that stuff, so it was form of a pure consequence of relationship-building,” Pietersen says. “These occasions would run you round for 48 or 72 hours, typically with some sleep blended in, and also you get to compete together with your buddies and have a great time.”
Since coming to MIT along with his spouse and two youngsters, Pietersen has embraced the native operating group 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 came about in Florida, after which he was deployed to Saudi Arabia. He occurred to write down one among 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, attempting to determine issues out with the assistance of all of the mentors at MIT and the sources accessible 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 warfare. The expertise demonstrated one other highly effective software for his work at MIT.
“We’ve post-conflict areas all over the world the place youngsters try to play and there are landmines and unexploded ordnances of their backyards,” Pietersen says. “Ukraine is an efficient instance of this within the information immediately. There are all the time remnants of warfare left behind. Proper now, individuals have to enter these doubtlessly harmful areas and clear them, however new remote-sensing methods may 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 constructions, 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 atmosphere to evaluate. Various kinds of sensors extract totally different sorts of data and every has its professionals and cons. There’s nonetheless plenty of work to be accomplished 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 Pressure engineers frequently carry out the identical airfield evaluation simulations he participated in in Florida. He hopes sometime quickly, these assessments shall be accomplished not by people in protecting gear, however by drones.
“Proper now, we depend on seen strains 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.”
