North Carolina’s Moore County Sheriff’s Office recently used a UAS to locate a missing 11-year-old child. ​After arriving to the Jackson Springs, North Carolina residence where Moore County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched on the night of March 1, Moore County Sheriff’s Office Drone Pilot, Lieutenant Tim Davis immediately launched the department's DJI Matrice 210 UAS to search for the child. Within just 15 minutes, the UAS observed a heat signature in the wooded area approximately 100 yards from the residence across the highway. Lieutenant Davis used his radio to direct deputies to the location of the heat signature, and the deputies located the child, sleeping under some thick tree limbs and brush.

According to a news release from the Grand Forks County Sheriff's Department in Grand Forks, North Dakota, via the Grand Forks Herald, the Northeast Region Unmanned Aircraft Systems Unit will begin proactive deployment of its UAS on March 1, which will allow officers that are trained as pilots to take UAS with them as they patrol their areas. The unit has authorization to fly UAS anywhere in the nation, according to Sheriff's Lt. B.J. Maxson, who oversees the Northeast Region UAS Unit.   Before this week’s development, the unit had just two UAS, and required law enforcement to go to the Sheriff's Department to pick up the UAS. This meant that the unit was used as a reactionary measure.

Bihrle Applied Research (Bihrle) and BNSF Railway (BNSF) have announced that they successfully demonstrated the processing of several thousand images at a time, covering hundreds of miles of track for the automatic detection, classification and reporting of rail conditions. This feat was made possible thanks to RailVision, which is a “computer vision technology solution” developed by the companies in support of BNSF’s UAS research initiatives. RailVision allows BNSF to automatically process images collected by UAS during supplemental railway inspection flights, and generates actionable reports in a significantly less amount of time required by traditional methods.

In Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, the Broken Arrow Police Department says that its new UAS has proved beneficial in a variety of use cases over the last two months. The UAS provides a real-time view from above, which officers say is very important when their special operations team is activated. One recent use case for the UAS came a few weeks ago, when the UAS was deployed during a standoff. Via News on 6, officer James Koch says that “the initial information that we received was that there may be someone inside who could have someone held hostage.” Koch goes on to say that “we didn't know if there was anybody inside that was lying in wait.”