Papers
3
Total Citations
13
H-Index
3
About
Heike Frei is a pioneering researcher in autonomous space navigation, specializing in vision-based relative navigation for uncrewed spacecraft operations. Her work directly addresses critical challenges in on-orbit servicing, space debris removal, and formation flying—areas essential for sustainable space exploration. Frei’s most influential contribution is her development of domain randomisation combined with CNN-based keypoint regression for pose initialisation, enabling monocular camera systems to estimate the relative position and orientation of uncooperative, finite-symmetric spacecraft targets. This breakthrough, detailed in her 2023 paper (6 citations), overcomes the limitations of traditional methods that require cooperative beacons or prior models. She further advanced point cloud registration with a smoothed normal distribution transform (NDT) approach (4 citations), improving robustness for space rendezvous without relying on perfect initial guesses. Her 2022 work on operations of on-orbit servicing missions (3 citations) provides a comprehensive framework for mission planning. With a growing citation footprint, Frei is establishing herself as a key innovator in autonomous space robotics, bridging computer vision and aerospace engineering to enable safer, more efficient proximity operations in orbit.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 3Operations of On-Orbit Servicing Missions3 citations · 2022