Yep. I've worked in a startup making a Laser Direct Imaging PCB photomasking machine, basically using lasers to do photo masks etc a couple year ago. When I came in, there was a custom IPC thing made, sending essentially Python dicts over ZeroMQ (IIRC). It worked to get the machine running and doing it's thing. For calibration of the cameras (needed to see how warped the PCB was and adjust the pattern) I needed to keep track of transforms etc. A perfect use-case for something like ROS's TF, in some incarnation.

The machine was not a 'robot' per se, but there was many sensors, decision making, actuation, so kinda like a robot.

For debugging the images and calibration transforms, we needed to write custom stuff. The whole thing was akin to ROS, with a couple days it could have been made to work with it. But alas