So far for my robot arm, I have only framed the pose-to-pose keys. I still have yet to animate the actual full cycle and of the arm picking and the actual chess piece.

This is the video reference I looked at for the robot arm assignment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_U4Hfgp7rQ&feature=relmfu

This is the pose-to-pose sketch for the robot arm

Straight Ahead & Pose-to-Pose

Straight ahead is another animation principle. It is hand draw & the animator draws the first single frame and continues drawing every single frame until they get to the final frame. And in order to capture single frames the animator usually draws the in between frames with unusual movement. In other words, the animator draws the first and last frame and then they draw the in-between frames as well.
Pose-to-Pose is literally the animator planning their action pose to pose. The poses are the important frames of the story that best tell the story that the animator is trying to tell. This principle is great for planning for poses and timing.
*The picture illustrates straight ahead (top) & pose-to-pose (bottom).

Reference Link:

http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mobile-design/blog/animation_principle_four_strai/

http://www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/straight.html

Final work for the Path Animation Assignment; done in maya.

This is my progress so far; I plan to fix up the environment, I want to give it pillars as well. Also, I plan to tweak with the inputs to give a more realistic path. I'm not sure if this is just an issue I'm running into but for some reason my keys would not set and I have to leave it as if or else the cart does not even move at all. But other than that, I feel I do have to hang it of and can't wait to add more tweaks to make it realistic.

Instead of posting a video I'd added the reference link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I-T7vQRKT8&feature=related

This video is not necessarily showing you every step you have to take to model a car but it is highlighting the necessary steps to take when modeling a vehicle in general. This is a very detailed model but I believe it is highlighting the main point when it comes to modeling a vehicle; using surfaces to have a better design for your car.

EASE IN & EASE OUT
This is another principle of animation and the best way to illustrate/explain this principle is when a object gradually accelerates, or comes to rest, from a pose. As I stated earlier in squash and stretch, the best example is a bouncing ball because as it goes up gravity affects and it slows down this is when easing in occurs in the ball. Easing out occurs in a ball when it starts its downward motion much more rapidly until it hits the ground.

Reference Links:

http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~patrick/csc418/notes/tutorial11.pdf

http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/animation/character_animation/principles/slow_in_and_out.htm

Finished version for my Midterm final.