Some of the older autonomous challenges involving flight I remember a lot of contestants had QNX on board vs. let's say VxWorks or others.

I also guess QNX having more point-to-point IPC/RPC fits some stuff better without having to plop in (possibly expensive) middleware like CORBA-RT

The way that IPC/RPC worked across the network was the real power of QNX and a very much under appreciated aspect of it. SUN microsystems had this slogan: "The Network Is The Computer". But they never really delivered on that QNX and Plan9 actually did.