You're right that an event-driven style is useful for programming mobile robots, but a lot of the time the tricky part is actually generating events (usually from sensors) in the first place. I haven't seen anyone use libuv for this sort of infrastructure, but ROS (www.ros.org) provides everything you need for mobile (and other forms of) robotics: publish-subscribe message passing, client-server, wrappers for common robot platforms. I think it has essentially the functionality you're talking about.