Method of acquiring and processing autonomous aerial vehicle data

A system for acquiring and processing autonomous aerial vehicle data to estimate netto-variometer measurement comprising:

• an autonomous aerial vehicle, comprising:
• a computing system, and
• sensors;
• the computing system configured to:
• obtain a baseline sink polar model;
• obtain flight data about the autonomous aerial vehicle in flight from the sensors;
• use a filtering technique to normalize the flight data;
• select steady-state flight data from the normalized flight data;
• generate a performance sink polar model from the selected steady-state flight data;
• and
• compute estimated netto-variometer measurements during flight by using the baseline sink polar model and the performance sink polar model from the selected steady-state flight data,
• wherein generating a performance sink polar model from the selected steady-state flight data comprises fitting the selected steady-state flight data to a second-degree polynomial,
• wherein the second-degree polynomial fit is given by:
• υs(Va)=asVa2+bsVa+cs
• where Va is airspeed, and as, bs and cs are polynomial coefficients set by the fitting process.