Hello,
I thought I share a little industrial robot animation I made a few moths ago.
It is here : http://www.bestsharing.com/files/ZBNbyI284213/Blender%20-%20Staeubli.mov.html
The actual model was exported from Solid Works (VRML) and then imported into Blender, so the mesh is very messy.
The robot picks up a simple cube and places it on a virtual conveyor. I thought this is a nice example of a path animation. The robot is rigged and the last bone is constrained to the cube and the cube is constrained to the path. This setup worked much faster and more precise than hand-animating the robot rig.
In order to reduce rendertime I used Blenders radiosity rendering/baking for the factory background.