From a person who builds robots, three notes:

1. Camera

Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions, you can access the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second. That’s impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.

2. Optimized libraries

I know that Raspberry Pi has “WiringPi” (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got “WiringOP”. I don’t know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you’d have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO access frequencies instead of megahertz.

3. Antenna socket

Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you’d connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.