Sona college team wins mitsubishi global factory automation contest

Bengaluru : A four-member team from Sona College of Technology, Salem, has won the MECA Global Finals 2026, a factory automation competition organised by Mitsubishi Electric in Tokyo.

Team Nexus AI emerged the Gold Cup winner after competing against national-winning teams from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand. The first and second runner-up positions went to teams from MKSSS’s Cummins College of Engineering for Women and COEP Technological University, both from Pune.

The Sona team comprised final-year B.E. students Tharanika K, Seralathan R, Vijay B and Tharana A S, with Tharanika K leading the team. The students had earlier won the sixth Mitsubishi Electric Cup National Level Competition held in Pune in February 2026.

The team developed an intelligent PLC programming assistant using artificial intelligence. The system enables engineers to describe the intended behaviour of an industrial machine in simple English, which the AI converts into Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) code.

The project was developed over nearly 150 days with support from faculty mentors in the Electrical and Electronics Engineering department and Mitsubishi Electric India. At the Tokyo finals, the students demonstrated the prototype before an international jury and answered technical questions on its operation and scalability.

Tharanika said the global victory was a matter of pride and validated the team’s innovation at an international level.

Sona Institutions Vice Chairman Chocko Valliappa said the project could simplify PLC programming by allowing engineers to convert machine instructions in plain English into working code.The winning team received the Gold Cup trophy, medals and a cash prize of ₹1 lakh.

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