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Robotics education is often constrained by the high cost and limited accessibility of physical robots, which can hinder the learning experience for many students. To address this challenge, the Fundamentals of Robotics Education (FORE) project, part of a larger NSF-funded collaborative work, was developed to create an accessible and comprehensive online learning platform. FORE provides a student-centered approach to robotics education, featuring a robust code editor, real-time simulation, and interactive lessons. This paper presents the architecture and implementation of the FORE platform, highlighting its key components, including the backend simulation using Gazebo and ROS2, a frontend visualizer built with Three.js, and the integration of a Python-based coding environment. We discuss the development process, the contributions of the student team, and the challenges encountered during the project. The results demonstrate the platform’s effectiveness in making robotics education more easily available. These findings originate from software testing and utilization by senior computer science students, as well as feedback from participants at the University of Nevada, Reno College of Engineering’s annual Capstone Course Innovation Day. The platform allows students to gain hands-on experience without the need for physical hardware. Its adaptability enables it to serve a broad audience of undergraduate students, offering an encompassing and accessible solution for modern robotics education. 

The field of automated face verification has become saturated in recent years, with state-of-the-art methods outperforming humans on all benchmarks. Many researchers would say that face verification is close to being a solved problem. We argue that evaluation datasets are not challenging enough, and that there is still significant room for improvement in automated face verification techniques. This paper introduces the DoppelVer dataset, a challenging face verification dataset consisting of doppelganger pairs. Doppelgangers are pairs of individuals that are extremely visually similar, oftentimes mistaken for one another. With this dataset, we introduce two challenging protocols: doppelganger and Visual Similarity from Embeddings (ViSE). The doppelganger protocol utilizes doppelganger pairs as negative verification samples. The ViSE protocol selects negative pairs by isolating image samples that are very close together in a particular embedding space. In order to demonstrate the challenge that the DoppelVer dataset poses, we evaluate a state-of-the-art face verification method on the dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that the DoppelVer dataset is significantly more challenging than its predecessors, indicating that there is still room for improvement in face verification technology.