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"Science and science fiction, how do you even distinguish the two?"
- Jerry Pournelle

Ramrobot  
  An autonomous interstellar exploration craft using gathered hydrogen for fuel.  

...the ramrobots were not human.

During the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the ramrobots explored most of what later came to be called Known Space. They were complexly programmed, but their mission was simple. Each was to find a habitable planet.

Unfortunately they were programmed wrong.

The designers didn’t know it, and the UN didn’t know it; but the ramrobots were programmed only to find a habitable point. Having located a world the right distance from the star to which it was sent, the ramrohot probe would drop and circle until it found a place at ground level which matched its criteria for atmospheric composition, average temperature, water vapor, et cetera. Then the ramrobot would beam its laser pulse back at the solar system, and the UN would respond by sending a colony slowboat.

Technovelgy from The Ethics of Madness, by Larry Niven.
Published by If in 1967
Additional resources -

From Niven's 1968 story A Gift from Earth:

Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds.

The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching those of light. Long ago, the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets...

Interstellar ramscoop robot #143 left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting toward insterstellar space, she looked like a huge metal insect, makeshift and hastily built. Yet, except for the contents of her cargo pod, she was identical to the last forty of her predecessors. Her nose was the ramscoop generator, a massive, heavily armored cylinder with a large orifice in the center. Along the sides were two big fusion motors, aimed ten degrees outward, mounted on oddly jointed metal structures like the folded legs of a praying mantis. The hull was small, containing only a computer and an insystem fuel tank.

Juno was invisible behind her when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her tail began to unroll. The cable was thirty miles long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule chain. Trailing at the end was a lead capsule as heavy as the ramrobot itself.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Ethics of Madness
  More Ideas and Technology by Larry Niven
  Tech news articles related to The Ethics of Madness
  Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven

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