In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer within the US air weapon, went on a training mission to judge damage on a runway on a runway, and after a simulated attack, practiced the “basic recovery protocol”. For hours, his team with chemical protective equipment went over the realm and sparked in geocoordinates while documenting damage and in search of threats like unploded ammunition.
Work is standard for all air force engineers before they’ve been used, nevertheless it was for Pietersen who had special importance for Pietersen who had a special importance for the last five years for the assessment of airfields as a master student and now as a doctoral student and Mathworks scholarship holder. For Pietersen, the time -consuming, tedious and potentially dangerous work underlined the potential for his research to enable distant airfield rankings.
“This experience was really at eye level,” says Pietersen. “We have announced for nearly a decade that a brand new system -based system is within the works, nevertheless it continues to be limited to discover non -exploded regulations by the lack. From the air they give the impression of being at rocks or rubble. Even ultra-high resolution cameras just don't work well enough. A fast and distant airfield assessment is just not yet standard practice. We are still only able to do that on foot, and my research comes into play there. “
Pietersen's goal is to create automated drone -based systems for evaluating the airfield damage and to acknowledge non -exploded ammunition. This has led him to a lot of research paths, from deep learning to small, unwritten air systems to “hyper -spectral” imaging, which records passive electromagnetic radiation over a big selection of wavelengths. The hyper -spectral imaging becomes cheaper, faster and more durable, which could make the research of Pietersen in a lot of applications, including agriculture, emergency response, mining and constructing.
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Pietersen grew up in a suburb of Sacramento, California, and drew himself in mathematics and physics in school. But he was also a cross country athlete and an Eagle Scout, and he wanted a solution to put together his interests.
“I liked the varied challenge presented by the Air Force Academy,” says Pietersen. “My family has no history of the servant, however the recruiters talked concerning the holistic training through which academics were part, but additionally sporting fitness and leadership. This comprehensive approach to the school experience addressed me. “
Pietersen studied civil engineering as students on the Air Force Academy, where he first learned tips on how to perform academic research. This needed to learn a bit computer programming.
“In my last 12 months, the Air Force Research Labs had some projects in reference to civil engineers who fell into my scope as a civil engineer,” recalls Pietersen. “While my domain knowledge contributed to define the initial problems, it was very clear that the event of the appropriate solutions requires a deeper understanding of the pc vision and distant sensing.”
The projects, which handled aircraft paving rankings and threat detection, also caused Pietersen to make use of hyper -spectral imaging and machine learning, on which he arrange when he got here in 2020 to follow his master and doctoral thesis.
“With was a transparent selection for my research, for the reason that school has such a robust story of research partnerships and multidisciplinary pondering that helps them solve these unconventional problems,” says Pietersen. “There isn’t any higher place on this planet than with for the latest work.”
When Pietersen got here up, he also accepted extreme sports akin to ultra marathons, skydiving and climbing. Some of them got here from his participation in infantry comprehensive competitions as students. The multi -day competitions are military -oriented races through which teams from all around the world cross mountains and perform graded activities akin to tactical combat insurance, orientation run and market manner.
“The amount with which I ran in college was really in these items, so it was a form of natural consequence of the connection structure,” says Pietersen. “These events would run around for 48 or 72 hours, sometimes with a bit sleep, and so they can compete with their buddies and have an excellent time.”
Since Pietersen has come together with his wife and two children, he has accepted the local running community and even worked as a parachute jumper in indoor in New Hampshire, although he admits that the winter of the east coast was hard for him and his family to adapt.
Pietersen was distant between 2022 and 2024, but he didn’t comfortably research from a house office. The training that showed him the truth of the airfield rankings took place in Florida, after which he was used to Saudi Arabia. He unintentionally wrote certainly one of his doctoral students from a tent within the desert.
Now on the part and shortly before his doctorate is accomplished this spring, Pietersen is grateful for all individuals who have taken him through throughout his trip.
“It was fun to explore every kind of technical disciplines and use all mentors to seek out out and the resources which are available for these really area of interest problems,” says Pietersen.
Research with a purpose
In the summer of 2020, Pietersen accomplished an internship at Halo Trust, a humanitarian organization that worked on eliminating land mines and other explosives from the areas affected by the war. Experience showed one other powerful application for his work on.
“We have regions after the conflict all around the world where children attempt to play and there are landmines and non -exploded regulations of their backyards,” says Pietersen. “Ukraine is an excellent example of this within the news today. They are at all times the stays of the war back. At the moment, people must go into these potentially dangerous areas and make clear, but recent distant sensing techniques could speed up processing and make it far more secure. “
Although Pietersensens Master's work was mainly about evaluating the traditional wear of road structures, his doctoral thesis has focused on opportunities for recognizing non -exploded regulations and more serious damage.
“When the runway is attacked, bombs and craters give in all places,” says Pietersen. “This ensures a difficult environment. Different forms of sensors extract various kinds of information and every have its benefits and drawbacks. There continues to be a variety of work to do each on the hardware and on the software side of things, but up to now hyper -spectral data appear to be a promising discriminator for deep learning object detectors. “
After completion, Pietersen can be stationed in Guam, where the Air Force engineers repeatedly perform the identical airfield assessment simulations through which he took part in Florida. He hopes that someday these assessments will soon be carried out by people in protective equipment, but by drones.
“At the moment we depend on visible site lines,” says Pietersen. “If we are able to move to spectral imaging and deep learning solutions, we are able to finally perform distant reviews that each one make it safer.”
