Is Automator intended to create distributable stand-alone apps?
It's not really designed for this, but I think you can hack it to do what you'd like.

First, to get the relative path to the .app package, you'll want to add a Run AppleScript action before your shell script. The code for the AppleScript should be something like this:

on run {input, parameters}
   set p to POSIX path of (path to me)
   return {p}
end run


That will pass the path to your .app bundle to your shell script action as an argument. Just set the Run Shell Script to pass input as arguments and you should be set to use the path in your shell script however you need to:


Once that's done, you can package whatever executables you need in the Contents/Resources folder of the .app bundle. You can get there in the Finder by right/command-clicking the .app and selecting Show Package Contents.

Important Note: Automator rewrites the .app bundle every time you save it, so you'll have to add the executables again every time after you make a change.