Yep, write all of your lower level components in C to run on PICs (or HDL on FPGAs, either way you get high reliability) and have those interface with larger sy

Yep, write all of your lower level components in C to run on PICs (or HDL on FPGAs, either way you get high reliability) and have those interface with larger systems that run higher level software to display sensor data and offer a control panel to command the actuators in the system. Just like in a car, the collision detector runs fast low level C but it feeds data over CANbus back to the ECU which is probably running an RTOS and sends that sensor data to the head unit which probably runs some sort of Linux-flavor to blink an icon on the reverse camera video feed.