The House select committee on combatting China held an event highlighting American tech and robotics manufacturers on Capitol Hill. Tesla made an appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday where the company was held up as one of several key American manufacturers during a bipartisan event on U.S.-made robotics. Two Tesla humanoid robots were at the event, with onlookers crowding the machines as they struck various poses. They waved their arms at times, and held up hands with two fingers aloft on each in a Richard Nixon-like pose. At one point, a robot's arm swung out and hit the rope dividing it from the crowd, briefly sending a security guard scrambling to fix it.

DETROIT – Ford Motor Co. is making Miami-Dade County its new test bed for self-driving vehicles. The automaker and its partners -- Domino's Pizza, ride-hailing company Lyft and delivery company Postmates -- are starting pilot programs to see how consumers react to autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. Self-driving startup and Ford partner Argo AI already has a fleet of cars in the area making the highly detailed maps that are necessary for self-driving. Ford also will establish its first-ever autonomous vehicle terminal in Miami, where it will learn how to service and deploy its test fleet. More services will likely be introduced as the partnership goes on, including Chariot, an app-based shuttle service owned by Ford.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform a multitude of industries, including retail, small business accounting and even product design. The energy and utilities markets could be next. It's still early days in terms of adoption, but there are numerous use cases for AI in the energy and utilities industries. AI can be used to make smart electric grids more efficient in delivering energy, can predict when batteries and other equipment will fail and can also help make energy exploration easier and more economical. AI and one of its subsets, machine learning, are digital trends poised to disrupt the energy industry, according to a recent report from Wood Mackenzie, an energy, chemicals, renewables, metals and mining research and consultancy group, Greentech Media (GTM) reports.

Leaders of two South Dade cities have a warning for Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez: Don't try to convince us to wait for driverless cars when we've been promised a new rail line. The mayors of Cutler Bay and Palmetto Bay wrote Gimenez this week to protest what they claim was a major reversal during a private May 15 meeting on the county's multi-billion-dollar plan to expand rail countywide. Instead of extending Metrorail south to Florida City, Gimenez reportedly floated the idea of using high-tech buses as a transition to a transportation revolution: the arrival of autonomous cars and their ability to revolutionize highway travel. "If the county's plan is to abandon what has been promised by way of the SMART plan, then it is only fair that we let the residents know now," read the May 22 letter from Peggy Bell, the mayor of Cutler Bay, and Eugene Flinn, Palmetto Bay's mayor. "However, we want to make it clear that our position has not changed and that we feel that the County is breaking another promise made to the residents which will undoubtedly shake the trust of its constituency."

If a new driverless shuttle bus makes riders nervous, IBM's Watson system is on board to make feel passengers feel less alone. And the bus' cute name – Olli – might help, too. TechRepublic reports that Maryland's Local Motors is partnering with IBM on its autonomous shuttle bus named Olli. IBM is contributing its Watson Internet of Things (IoT) for Automotive cognitive computing system. This comes as the global market for self-driving cars is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years.