In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer within the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to evaluate damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the world in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and searched for threats like unexploded munitions.
The work is standard for all Air Force engineers before they deploy, however it held special significance for Pietersen, who has spent the last five years developing faster, safer approaches for assessing airfields as a master’s student and now a PhD candidate and MathWorks Fellow at MIT. For Pietersen, the time-intensive, painstaking, and potentially dangerous work underscored the potential for his research to enable distant airfield assessments.
“That have was really eye-opening,” Pietersen says. “We’ve been told for nearly a decade that a brand new, drone-based system is within the works, however it remains to be limited by an inability to discover unexploded ordnances; from the air, they appear too very similar to rocks or debris. Even ultra-high-resolution cameras just don’t perform well enough. Rapid and distant airfield assessment is just not the usual practice yet. We’re still only prepared to do that on foot, and that’s where my research is available in.”
Pietersen’s goal is to create drone-based automated systems for assessing airfield damage and detecting unexploded munitions. This has taken him down plenty of research paths, from deep learning to small uncrewed aerial systems to “hyperspectral” imaging, which captures passive electromagnetic radiation across a broad spectrum of wavelengths. Hyperspectral imaging is getting cheaper, faster, and more durable, which could make Pietersen’s research increasingly useful in a variety of applications including agriculture, emergency response, mining, and constructing assessments.
Finding computer science and community
Growing up in a suburb of Sacramento, California, Pietersen gravitated toward math and physics at school. But he was also a cross country athlete and an Eagle Scout, and he wanted a solution to put his interests together.
“I liked the multifaceted challenge the Air Force Academy presented,” Pietersen says. “My family doesn’t have a history of serving, however the recruiters talked concerning the holistic education, where academics were one part, but so was athletic fitness and leadership. That well-rounded approach to the school experience appealed to me.”
Pietersen majored in civil engineering as an undergrad on the Air Force Academy, where he first began learning methods to conduct academic research. This required him to learn a bit little bit of computer programming.
“In my senior yr, the Air Force research labs had some pavement-related projects that fell into my scope as a civil engineer,” Pietersen recalls. “While my domain knowledge helped define the initial problems, it was very clear that developing the fitting solutions would require a deeper understanding of computer vision and distant sensing.”
The projects, which handled airfield pavement assessments and threat detection, also led Pietersen to start out using hyperspectral imaging and machine learning, which he built on when he got here to MIT to pursue his master’s and PhD in 2020.
“MIT was a transparent selection for my research because the college has such a robust history of research partnerships and multidisciplinary considering that helps you solve these unconventional problems,” Pietersen says. “There’s no higher place on the planet than MIT for cutting-edge work like this.”
By the point Pietersen got to MIT, he’d also embraced extreme sports like ultra-marathons, skydiving, and mountain climbing. A few of that stemmed from his participation in infantry skills competitions as an undergrad. The multiday competitions are military-focused races during which teams from around the globe traverse mountains and perform graded activities like tactical combat casualty care, orienteering, and marksmanship.
“The group I ran with in college was really into that stuff, so it was type 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 also you get to compete together with your buddies and have a superb time.”
Since coming to MIT along with his wife and two children, Pietersen has embraced the local running community and even worked as an indoor skydiving instructor in Latest Hampshire, though he admits the East Coast winters have been tough for him and his family to regulate to.
Pietersen went distant between 2022 to 2024, but he wasn’t doing his research from the comfort of a house office. The training that showed him the truth of airfield assessments took place in Florida, after which he was deployed to Saudi Arabia. He happened to jot down one in every of his PhD journal publications from a tent within the desert.
Now back at MIT and nearing the completion of his doctorate this spring, Pietersen is thankful for all of the individuals who have supported him in throughout his journey.
“It has been fun exploring all varieties of different engineering disciplines, attempting to figure things out with the assistance of all of the mentors at MIT and the resources available to work on these really area of interest problems,” Pietersen says.
Research with a purpose
In the summertime of 2020, Pietersen did an internship with the HALO Trust, a humanitarian organization working to clear landmines and other explosives from areas impacted by war. The experience demonstrated one other powerful application for his work at MIT.
“Now we have post-conflict regions around the globe where kids are attempting to play and there are landmines and unexploded ordnances of their backyards,” Pietersen says. “Ukraine is a superb example of this within the news today. There are all the time remnants of war left behind. Right away, people should go into these potentially dangerous areas and clear them, but latest remote-sensing techniques could speed that process up and make it far safer.”
Although Pietersen’s master’s work primarily revolved around assessing normal wear and tear of pavement structures, his PhD has focused on ways to detect unexploded ordnances and more severe damage.
“If the runway is attacked, there could be bombs and craters throughout it,” Pietersen says. “This makes for a difficult environment to evaluate. Several types of sensors extract different kinds of data and every has its pros and cons. There remains to be quite a lot of work to be done on each the hardware and software side of things, but thus far, hyperspectral data appears to be a promising discriminator for deep learning object detectors.”
After graduation, Pietersen shall be stationed in Guam, where Air Force engineers usually perform the identical airfield assessment simulations he participated in in Florida. He hopes someday soon, those assessments shall be done not by humans in protective gear, but by drones.
“Right away, we depend on visible lines of site,” Pietersen says. “If we will move to spectral imaging and deep-learning solutions, we will finally conduct distant assessments that make everyone safer.”
