Search And Rescue (SAR) is sometimes VERY political. We build long-range RC airplanes to help find boats in distress at sea on the Mediterranean [1]. As you might expect, we could do 10x better, with less resources, if the powers that be wouldn't make it impossible to e.g. launch from an island and return to an island. So we launch from a boat, because it's not national territory and they can't make it impossible.
Shameless Plug: If you wanna join, let us know. We definitely would benefit from better on&off-board image recognition. But there are many, less buzzword-y, challenges as well: designing, building & testing airplanes, training pilots, delivering planes & batteries (challenging due to Watt-Hour restrictions), remote issue debugging, etc.