Robot passing object to another robot

Guys, I’m trying to work out a better way of doing this animation, can you help?

Flash CS5
AS3

I’m working on a project where I need to animate multiple robots picking up parts and dropping them. I’ve attached a quick demo of the kind of movement I need.

At the moment I have a Part MovieClip inside a Robot MovieClip (so it will rotate with the robot) What I can’t work out how to do smoothly is, how do I release this Part Movie Clip so I can transfer it to another robot & rotate it following the second robot.

I can’t seem to copy/paste the Part’s last position from the 1st Robot’s animation to the 2nd Robot without it changing scale/position. Leaving me to basically position a new copy of the Part MovieClip until it sort of lines up with the old parts and switching between the two in the timeline.

There must be a better way of doing this. Any advice on how you would do this would be appreciated.

Thanks a lot