I work with robots. The leading middleware is ROS. It is multi language, but does not support JS out the box (unlike LISP, Java, C++ and Python), though there is movement there http://brandonalexander.com/rosnodejs/

I can see JS useful for a UI to a robot, but I can't see it replacing Python for math, or C++ for speed, or LISP for planning systems.

That said, I can imagine node.js being a better async message router than the current C++ one.

ROS is glued together with XML-RPC, which I think was a mistake (why not JSON???)