In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer within the U.S. Air Pressure, set out on a coaching mission to evaluate injury at an airfield runway, practising “base restoration” protocol after a simulated assault. For hours, his crew walked over the world in chemical safety gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented injury and regarded for threats like unexploded munitions.
The work is commonplace for all Air Pressure engineers earlier than they deploy, but it surely held particular significance for Pietersen, who has spent the final 5 years creating quicker, 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 probably harmful work underscored the potential for his analysis to allow distant airfield assessments.
“That have was actually eye-opening,” Pietersen says. “We’ve been instructed for nearly a decade {that a} new, drone-based system is within the works, however it’s nonetheless restricted by an lack of ability to determine 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. Speedy and distant airfield evaluation is just not 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 objective is to create drone-based automated techniques for assessing airfield injury and detecting unexploded munitions. This has taken him down quite 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, quicker, 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 pc science and group
Rising up in a suburb of Sacramento, California, Pietersen gravitated towards math and physics at school. However he was additionally a cross nation athlete and an Eagle Scout, and he wished a method to put his pursuits collectively.
“I appreciated the multifaceted problem the Air Pressure Academy offered,” Pietersen says. “My household doesn’t have a historical past of serving, however the recruiters talked concerning the holistic training, the place lecturers have been one half, however so was athletic health and management. That well-rounded method to the school expertise appealed to me.”
Pietersen majored in civil engineering as an undergrad on the Air Pressure Academy, the place he first started studying methods to conduct educational analysis. This required him to be taught just a little little bit of pc programming.
“In my senior 12 months, the Air Pressure 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 creating the suitable options would require a deeper understanding of pc imaginative and prescient and distant sensing.”
The tasks, which handled airfield pavement assessments and menace detection, additionally led Pietersen to start out 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 bought 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 wherein groups from world wide 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 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 together with your buddies and have an excellent time.”
Since coming to MIT along with his spouse and two kids, Pietersen has embraced the native working 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 fact of airfield assessments occurred in Florida, after which he was deployed to Saudi Arabia. He occurred to put in writing 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 enjoyable exploring all types of various engineering disciplines, attempting to determine issues out with the assistance of all of the mentors at MIT and the sources out there to work on these actually area of interest issues,” Pietersen says.
Analysis with a goal
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 battle. The expertise demonstrated one other highly effective software for his work at MIT.
“We have now post-conflict areas world wide the place children are attempting to play and there are landmines and unexploded ordnances of their backyards,” Pietersen says. “Ukraine is an effective instance of this within the information at the moment. There are at all times remnants of battle left behind. Proper now, individuals have to enter these probably harmful areas and clear them, however new remote-sensing strategies might pace 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 centered on methods to detect unexploded ordnances and extra extreme injury.
“If the runway is attacked, there could be bombs and craters throughout it,” Pietersen says. “This makes for a difficult setting to evaluate. Various kinds of sensors extract completely different sorts of knowledge and every has its execs and cons. There’s nonetheless loads of work to be executed on each the {hardware} and software program aspect of issues, however up to now, hyperspectral information seems to be a promising discriminator for deep studying object detectors.”
After commencement, Pietersen will probably be stationed in Guam, the place Air Pressure engineers repeatedly carry out the identical airfield evaluation simulations he participated in in Florida. He hopes sometime quickly, these assessments will probably 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.”
