Professor Hong is amazing, and gives a great introduction to the field of robotics and serial manuipulators. The class is usually half undergrad and half grad students. You can work on a team project (build a robot) or write a report, I think 90%-100% choose to do the project which is fun and requires dedication. The student presentations in the beginning of the lecture are very interesting as well and gives you a glimpse into various applications of robotics. Overall, this is one of my favorite classes.

Also: check out Professor Hong's lab and their very impressive work/research.

Prof. Hong's Kinematics class is a very enjoyable class to attend, as he is a leading expert in robotics and accordingly has many insights he can share. Content-wise it doesn't actually cover a whole lot: some background maths, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics and robot workspaces. Accordingly, you may wonder what you will spend most of the time doing and it is coursework:
-4 homeworks
-2 exams
-1 presentation
-1 group project

Here, the presentation coursework is known as "Robots in the News" and effectively each student (out of 100) has to make a 5-10 presentation on some recent development about robots. This sounds nice in practice, but given there's only 10 weeks in a quarter, the result is that half of every class is just student presentations of varying degree of quality. As such, the amount of time spent on actually relevant lecture material is not that much, which is unfortunate because both the homeworks and exams are generally tough. I personally would prefer the presentations are dropped from the curriculum so more time can be spent on what we're here to learn. This would also give us more time to work on the project, which is actually really fun and also really difficult to do well in the 3-4 weeks we have.

Also a tip for the exams: you will need Matlab scripts. Really good ones, too because this class has some of the messiest calculations I have seen in all of academia.