Christie Maddock
Papers
1
Total Citations
6
H-Index
1
About
Christie Maddock is a leading researcher in astrodynamics and spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control, with a particular focus on enabling autonomous operations in the most challenging space environments. Her work is central to the future of on-orbit servicing, active debris removal, and formation flying—missions that require spacecraft to navigate safely around uncooperative targets. Maddock’s major contribution lies in developing robust vision-based relative navigation systems that combine domain randomisation with convolutional neural networks for keypoint regression. This approach allows a spacecraft to estimate its pose relative to a non-cooperative, finite-symmetric target using only monocular camera images, a critical capability when no navigational aids are available from the target. Her most-cited paper (2023, 6 citations) demonstrates this method, achieving reliable initialisation even under significant domain shift. Beyond this, Maddock’s broader research portfolio includes trajectory optimisation and uncertainty quantification for autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations. Her work is notable for bridging the gap between simulation-based training and real-world spaceflight, offering practical, data-driven solutions for some of the most demanding problems in modern spaceflight.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1