Shandust Robotic Consortium.
Robert Shandust is the founder, owner, and president of a robots and droids production multinational. Well, "was" is a better term, since he died of old age some 12 years ago. However, nobody knows, since he was (at his instigation) immediately replaced by a droid made to his likeliness at the head of the company. Then, all employees were slowly and discreetly replaced by androids nearly indistinguishable from humans. Furthermore, the company has secret facilities on a barren planet, where it continues to manufacture robots and droids. The Robert Shandust droid really appears like the original, and even his personnality has been reproduced perfectly. However, all of these droids remain machines, none of them is sentient.
What purpose do these droids serve is a complete mystery. Maybe the aging Robert Shandust saw this as a way to survive as a machine. In any case the robots are now continuing to run and expand the company. All the benefits are used to devellop this secret base on the barren planet. Maybe they are trying to create the first civilization of machines... who would know if they were discovered? The problem however, is that in digging the planet's soil, they inadvertantly discovered an Alien artifact (some sort of starship as it superficially appears). Now they are unsure what to do about it, since nothing in their programm was implemented so they should know what to do should such a thing happen. Currently they are indecise, and have resumed their normal work. The alien artifact is kept under good watch, and the robots need better technology to perform analysis. They don't want to open it without knowing what would happen if doing it "blindly".