Misaka: Interactive Swarm Testbed for Smart Grid Distributed Algorithm Test and Evaluation

2020 IEEE/IAS Industrial and Commercial Power System Asia (I&CPS Asia) In this paper, we present Misaka, a visualized swarm testbed for smart grid algorithm evaluation, also an extendable open-source open-hardware platform for developing tabletop tangible swarm interfaces. The platform consists of a collection of custom-designed 3 omni-directional wheels robots each 10 cm in diameter, high accuracy localization through a microdot pattern overlaid on top of the activity sheets, and a software framework for application development and control, while remaining affordable (per unit cost about 30 USD at the prototype stage). We illustrate the potential of tabletop swarm user interfaces through a set of smart grid algorithm application scenarios developed with Misaka.