Oolite Bulletins

Well, obviously. But there’s no separate bounty for autopilots.

supposedly they are remote controlled by the Thargoid warship, so they are not robots but automata by definition.
However in (RL) reality, the thargonAI is independent from the ThargoidAI, except for the occasional check to see whether there are any left.
....
Thargons following through on an attack for some time indicates that comms-lag penalties are minimised by built-in responses and actions.
In theory this could mean that the craft are semi-sentient.

Or, in other words, the remote control consists of high-level commands to the tharglet’s AI. :-)

Exactly! That is what we are trying to implement in our own prototype.
Unfortunately, we still barely understand the lesser functionality levels of thargoid technology and controll 'software', so we cannot say with a 100% certainty that our thesis is right.