In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer within the U.S. Air Drive, set out on a coaching mission to evaluate injury at an airfield runway, practising “base restoration” protocol after a simulated assault. For hours, his group walked over the world in chemical safety gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented injury and seemed for threats like unexploded munitions.
The work is customary for all Air Drive engineers earlier than they deploy, however it held particular significance for Pietersen, who has spent the final 5 years growing quicker, 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 have was actually eye-opening,” Pietersen says. “We’ve been informed 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 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 nicely sufficient. Fast and distant airfield evaluation isn’t the usual apply 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 methods for assessing airfield injury and detecting unexploded munitions. This has taken him down quite a few analysis paths, from deep studying to small uncrewed aerial methods to “hyperspectral” imaging, which captures passive electromagnetic radiation throughout a broad spectrum of wavelengths. Hyperspectral imaging is getting cheaper, quicker, and extra sturdy, which may 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 at school. However he was additionally a cross nation athlete and an Eagle Scout, and he needed a technique to put his pursuits collectively.
“I appreciated the multifaceted problem the Air Drive 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 strategy to the faculty expertise appealed to me.”
Pietersen majored in civil engineering as an undergrad on the Air Drive Academy, the place he first started studying the way to conduct educational analysis. This required him to be taught somewhat little bit of laptop programming.
“In my senior yr, the Air Drive analysis labs had some pavement-related tasks that fell into my scope as a civil engineer,” Pietersen remembers. “Whereas my area information helped outline the preliminary issues, it was very clear that growing the suitable 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 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 college has such a powerful historical past of analysis partnerships and multidisciplinary pondering that helps you resolve 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 received to MIT, he’d additionally embraced excessive sports activities like ultra-marathons, skydiving, and mountaineering. A few of that stemmed from his participation in infantry expertise competitions as an undergrad. The multiday competitions are military-focused races through which groups from all over the world 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 form of a pure consequence of relationship-building,” Pietersen says. “These occasions would run you round for 48 or 72 hours, generally 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 kids, 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 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 truth of airfield assessments happened in Florida, after which he was deployed to Saudi Arabia. He occurred to jot 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, 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 objective
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 now have post-conflict areas all over the world the place youngsters 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 all the time remnants of struggle left behind. Proper now, folks have to enter these probably harmful areas and clear them, however new remote-sensing methods may 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 atmosphere to evaluate. Various kinds of sensors extract completely different sorts of knowledge and every has its professionals and cons. There may be nonetheless a number of work to be achieved on each the {hardware} and software program facet of issues, however to date, 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 Drive engineers usually carry out the identical airfield evaluation simulations he participated in in Florida. He hopes sometime quickly, these assessments will probably be achieved not by people in protecting gear, however by drones.
“Proper now, we depend on seen traces of web site,” Pietersen says. “If we will transfer to spectral imaging and deep-learning options, we will lastly conduct distant assessments that make everybody safer.”
