The non-FIRST version of the cRIO is used for many things. Three in particular come to mind:
- Beam collimators for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, controlling the highest energies used in any machine in the world
- Adaptive optics mirror control for the Southern African Large Telescope, the biggest optical telescope in the world
- The highest-resolution atomic force microscope in the world
It's a very rugged, very capable, very common platform for embedded control systems.