Animating

Jump

The jump i found to be the easiest of the 3 animations... Almost uniform animation of both foot controls. Altering the rotation of the feet to look more akin to a human jump.
The rotate on the hips dislocate i added for further dynamic. Think it really helped with the smoothness of the jump and lessened the rigidity of the character.
The same with the arms... I did the jump a few times myself and payed attention to how my arms moved. A static jump like this, my arms stayed loose by my side. Raising a bit on the descent. these features were exaggerated and heightened for effect on the robot.
The final tweaks came by using the graph editor to manipulate the tangents. Mainly breaking the tangents to affect the flow of the animation.

Idol

The idol animation consists of a foot tap, side to side weight shift and a lean forwards.
Being a robot it took a while to decide on what to do with the character in terms of animation.
In thinking about the 2nd part of the brief, i wanted an idol animation that would work as an interactive animation. So this is the animation for when another character comes close and interacts with the robot.
Foot tap to initialise the interaction, then a weight shift and then a look down and up over the 3rd party character.
A similar process to before but more features on the robot needed animating. More rotates..... more logic and consideration of process before beginning setting keys.
This animatio took 4 restarts before it looked anything like ready.

Walk

This was by far the hardest of the 3 animations. Requiring precision over 24 frames to create a (nearly) seamless loop. I watched numerous tutorials on walk cycles, and like with most outcomes in creative software, there are hundreds of different ways to go about it.
I decided to use this image as the base for my cycle. Ignoring the represented frames, and just using the static positions of the avatar.

This process required so many starts and restarts. Getting the positions right, moving the hips up and down as well as remembering to alter the foot controls and rotates. The bend and action of the legs required specific detail. Keying the frames in was ok but a lot of easing in and out with the keyframes made for a lengthy ordeal. (mainly the integers, the frames that Maya fills in for you between the keyed frames - these all needed adjusting and re adjusting multiple times.
The seamless loop was the most difficult challenge of them all and still is not quite right.
The tutorial suggested doing it over 25 frames, but finish on the 24th to allow for the correct positioning and 're-entry' to the initial frame position at frame 1. This method appeared logically valid, however it was still a frustratingly hard method of achieving the desired result.
The right leg really held me up. For some reason, i still cant figure it out, it skips and he has a bend at the knee towards frame 23 thats not supposed to be there. I tried and tried to iron this out, but whatever i did (adding more frames, setting more or fewer keys, graph editing) it just got worse and worse so i left it in its most basic state.