Tamil Nadu team wins Mitsubishi Electric’s global competition

The team of Tharanika K, Seralathan R, Vijay B and Tharana A S from Sona College of Technology in Salem, Tamil Nadu, won the grand prize at the MECA Global Finals 2026, a factory automation competition organised by Mitsubishi Electric in Tokyo last month. They won against competitors from engineering colleges in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines and Thailand. Normally, programming a factory machine’s controller (PLC) is slow and risky. Engineers write code by hand and can test it once the physical machine exists. This causes delays, needs scarce specialist programmers, and makes mistakes expensive to fix. Tharanika and team built a tool that lets an engineer describe a factory machine’s behaviour in plain English, and AI turns that description into working programmable logic controller (PLC) code. AI converts the machine instructions into safety-checked industrial code, and tests it on a digital twin before deployment, enabling quick development, safer validation, fewer programming errors, and reduced time, cost and effort during on-site commissioning.Seralathan told us their win could have been because their idea is potentially scalable across all kinds of PLCs – unlike the more narrow use cases of competing teams – and their use of an infrequently used programming language for AI to work on top of.The India leg of the competition saw nearly 300 applications from engineering colleges. In this leg, the second and third prize winners were respectively MKSSS’ Cummins College of Engineering for Women, Pune, and COEP Technological University, Pune.At the global level, the second and third prize winners were from Philippines and Thailand respectively.Atsushi Takase, MD of Mitsubishi Electric India, said the idea of the challenge was to empower the next generation of engineers by providing students with access to advanced automation technologies and opportunities to compete and excel on the global stage.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.