The big problem in my mind is that Python is the wrong tool for the job. It is 2016, there are more hard-RTOS prototyping platforms than ever before. My favorite is National Instrument's RIO platform, which lets you use C or LabVIEW (imho the best language for prototyping control algorithms by far). Mathworks also has a platform based on Matlab/Simulink, and the list goes on.
Why use Python when there are existing tools that are made for this type of application?
LabVIEW is great until you need a complicated data structure. I tried writing a tree to do kNN, and it turned out that doing a brute force search was faster even with 100k elements.
This is (now) open source project expecting community pull requests. How many would they get if they went with LabView? The big emphasis that I like seeing in modern scientists is reproducibility of results. Jupyter Notebook is a huge step in that direction (not really applicable here), but just using open source platform is still great.
I agree though that once algorithms are developed sufficiently they should be ported to RTOS platform and this box shouldn't be permitted on open roads.
Why use Python when there are existing tools that are made for this type of application?