Space engineers - Autonomous mining drone : Voxeliminator

Hi guys !

This drone is a 99% autonomous mining ship . All you have to do is place it close to an asteroid and start it.

It was inspired by this one :    • Space Engineers Locust - H  

It is capable of :
- Reorienting itself to find more rock to drill;
- Recharge its batteries and resume its work;
- Avoid obstacles;
- Stop itself when cargo containers are full or when batteries are depleted;
- Rejecting stone to only keep useful ore in the cargo, thus considerably increasing its autonomy.

The drone has multiple states :
- Drilling : the drone just pushes forward and drills whatever is in the way.
- Searching : the drone just made it through the asteroid and reorients itself until it detects rocks again.
- Recharging : the low battery threshold was reached and the drone is taking a break in the sun light to recharge it's battery before resuming its work.
- Avoiding : an obstacle has been detected and the drone will go backward until the obstacle is no longer detected or it is blocked by something. When the way seems clear it will resume drilling. If it can't resume drilling before a configurable amount of time, it will be marked as stuck.
- Stuck : the drone was unable to avoid an obstacle or detect rock while searching within the configured amount of time and
requires an operator's attention.
- Stopped : self-explanatory.

Components :
- 9 drills
- 1 large cargo container;
- 1 medium cargo container;
- 31 of small cargo containers;
- 2 batteries;
- 4 solar panels;
- 1 camera in the front;
- 1 camera in the back;
- 1 remote control;
- 1 antenna;
- 1 beacon;
- 4 sensors (1 unused);
- 4 sensors (1 unused);
- 1 programmable block;
- 1 conveyor sorter;
- 8 ejectors;
- 9 gyroscopes;
- 4 thrusters in all directions except forward;
- 8 forward thrusters;
- Etc...

Known issues :
- Sometimes gets stuck for no visible reasons. In this case it just needs to be restarted by either pushing the button in the back or by running the program using "StartCommand" as argument.
- Searching for more rocks may fail even if there is more rock to mine because the drone rotates on a plane instead of checking all directions.

It is recommended not to use more than 2 or 3 of those for a 64x64x64 asteroid.

Future versions may include auto-pilot from / to mother ship, a more reliable rock detection capability and a more stable AI.

Ship is available on workshop ! Feel free to leave comments and reuse its ideas and source code.