Performing an automatic, remote and safe evaluation of the airport

The work is standard for all air force engineers before deployment, but for Pietersen, who spent the last five years of development, had special importance, safer approaches for evaluation of aerial fields as a master’s and now doctoral candidate and Mathworks member to MIT. For Pietersen, he emphasized time exploration, painting and potentially dangerous work potential for his research to allow remote airport evaluation.

“This experience was really opening eyes,” says Pietersen. “We have been told that a new system based on dropping in works is at most ten years, but is still limited by the inability to identify Nexphanten’s nature; they look too much like rocks or debris. Quick and remote airport assessment is not yet standard practice.”

The aim of Pietersen is to create an automated system based on drones to hit the airport damage and detect the nexploded ammunition. This has reduced him a number of research paths, from deep learning to small uncovered air systems to “hyperspectral” imaging that captures passive electromagnetic radiation across a wide range of wavelengths. Hyperspectral imaging becomes cheaper, faster and more sustainable, which could cause PieterSn research increasingly useful in many applications, including agriculture, reaction to emergencies, mining and building assessment.

Finding computer science and community

Pietersen grew up in the suburbs of Sacramento in California and at school attracted to mathematics and physics. But it was also an athlete on a cross -country country and an eagle scout and wanted a way to put their interesting together.

“I liked the multilateral challenge presented by the Air Force Academy,” says Pietersen. “My family does not have a history -serving history, but recruiters spoke of holistic education, where we are academics academics, but like athletic fitness and leadership. This well -rounded approach to university experience attracted to me.”

Pietersen specialized in building engineering as an undergrade at Air Force Academy, where he first began to learn how to perform academic research. This required to learn a little computer programming.

“In my senior year, the Air Force Research laboratories had exclusive projects related to sidewalks that fell into my extent as a civil engineer,” recalls Pietersen. “Although my domain knowledge helped to define initial problems, it was very clear that the development would require the right solutions to deeper understanding of computer vision and long -distance survey.

Projects that dealt with the evaluation of roads and threat detection also led Pietersen to start using the hyperspectral imaging and machine learning that Hebitl was carried out in 2020 by his master and PhD.

“Mit was a clear choice for my research, because the school has such a strong history of research partnerships and multidisciplinary thinking that will help you solve these unconventional problems,” says Pietersen. “There is no better place in the world than a mit for top work like this.”

Before Pietersen got to MIT, he also accepted extreme sports such as ultra-marathons, skydiving and climbing. Some of them stem from his participation in infantry skills as Undergrad. Multi -day completion are races focused on military races, in which teams from around the world go through the mountains and perform graduated activities such as tactical care for victims, orientation and shooting processing.

“The crowd with whom I ran in college was really into those things, so it was a natural consequence of building relationships,” says Pietersen. “These events would organize you for 48 or 72 hours, sometimes mixing some sleep, and you will compete with your friends and have fun.”

The sale, which comes to MIT with his wife and two children, received a local running community and even worked as an ANOOR Skydiving instructor in New Hampshire, although he admitted that winters on the east coast were hard to adapt to him and his family.

Pietersen went between 2022 and 2024 with a long -distance remote, but does not make his research from the comfort of the home office. Training that showed him that the airport was re -evaluated in Florida and was then deployed to Saudi Arabia. He accidentally wrote one of his publications PhD from a tent in the desert.

Now back to MIT and is approaching to complete your doctorate this spring, Pietersen is grateful for all the people who supported him during his journey.

“It was fun to explore all the spells of different engineering disciplines and tried to think of things using all MIT mentors and resources available to work on work really specialized,” says Pietersen.

Research with the purpose

In the summer of 2020, Pietersen made an internal with Halo Trust, a humanitarian organization that worked on the deletion of solid mines and other explosives from the impact of the war. Experience has shown another powerful application for his work on MIT.

“We have post -conflict regions surround the world where children are trying to play and found min and non -residential prefurs in their backyards,” says Pietersen. “Ukraine is a good example in the news.

Although the primary work of Pietersen’s magic has revolved around the structures of the sidewalk structures, its PhD focused on ways to detect undue prebetes and more serious damage.

“If the track is attacked, there would be bombs and craters everywhere,” says Pietersen. “This causes a demanding environment to assess. Different types of sensors extract different types of information and each has its pros and disadvantages. There is still a lot of work on both the hardware and software side, but it still seems that hyperspectral data are promising discriminators.”

After graduation, Pietersen will be placed in Guam, where the Air Force engineers regularly perform the same simulations of the airport rating, which participated in Florida. He hopes that one day these assessments will not be Don from people in protective equipment, but drones.

“We are relying on the visible lines of the site right now,” Pietersen says. “If we can move to the solution of spectral displaying and deep learning, we can finally perform remote rating that facilitates safety in the evening.”