By and large, all of industry and academia working on modern robotics systems have converged on using event-driven publish/subscribe message busses for basically everything. For example, a camera driver will produce a stream of "image" events that the trigger other code across the system, all the way until a stream of "motor command" events come out the other side. This model is really valuable because it works so well with logging and replay workflows, and because it makes mocking and replacing different parts of the system really easy (up to and including mocking reality with a simulator). ROS is the major open source framework used in academia, and industry is split between using ROS and building proprietary internal protocols with similar functionalities.

It's not an exact match for the scalable-microservices world you're thinking of (for example, typically robots don't need to deal with runtime schema version skew), but could be interesting to learn about anyway.