How hard is it going to be for me to animate all the hydrolics on this. And, what kind of feet and hands should this robot have?
Now, I’m certainly no rigging expert, but you should be able to rig this. Try it, and see what you get. I’m sure you’ll get help here if you get into trouble.
General Grievious Hands. :yes:
Definately look into ‘snapping’ with the cursor. I rigged a robot with the ‘ball joints’ and the general way to make the rig smooth was to create the rig roughly, select the ‘ball’ for a particular joint, snap the cursor to the ball (selection to cursor), then snap the end of the bone(s) to the cursor. Shift-S brings up the snap menu.
For the hydraulic pistons the solution is to use Tracking.
The rod and cylinder should be separate meshes, with their centers arranged so that they are on opposite “ends” of the hydraulic assembly; preferably at the end points where the hydraulic assembly is bolted. But you might want to push them a bit “inside” the rod and the cylinder to avoid Track-To errors.
You then use tracking constraints so that the rod always points into the cylinder and the cylinder points over the rod.
After this the rod and cylinder are parented to the parts to which they should be bolted (say: Upper Arm for one and Forearm for the other)…
And then voila! If you bend the arm… the hydraulics “work”. 
If you want to see this in more detail you can refer to my Mil Mi 24 Hind Transformable actor project, I use lots of hydraulic elements.
Cheers!