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.”

Drone Museum Horie, which is located in the Minamihorie district in Osaka, Japan, is the nation's first UAS museum. The museum, which officially opened in December 2017, exhibits 16 types of UAS that have been produced in Japan and abroad. The UAS range in size, from an 18-gram palm-sized indoor UAS to a large crop-spraying UAS equipped with a 10-liter tank. The museum offers visitors the opportunity to learn the history of UAS, from early models that were designed for industrial use to more recent models that can send live video footage to a smartphone. Visitors can test fly the UAS, and purchase the ones that are on sale as well.