I used an automaton to hunt toxic sliths to raise loyalty points on my crafter for the gargoyle queen's forge.
Afterwards I used it to farm iron ingots, arrows, boards and bandaids from orcish mobs in the orc cave and cove orc fort, as I absolutely hate resource gathering. Automatons are just good enough for that, you will have problems hunting tougher mobs though.
I could have probably just used a vollem from the cleanup rewards on my crafter, but as my other mule got already one I wanted to try out the automaton.
Note that you cannot feed automatons, but they easily gain loyalty by giving them commands.
If you single click the tinkering tool, you can set it to repair mode after selecting the type of ingots for repairing, then make a macro which uses the tool while setting "target stored" to the automaton. One click and it is repaired this way. However, the tool gets bugged every now and then. In that case, flip to the crafting mode again and select the source of ingots again. Then switch back to repair mode.