Association of Machines and Mechanisms (AMM) decided to include a national label student competition exclusively for undergraduate students with 14th National Conference on Machines and Mechanisms (NaCoMM - 09). The main idea behind this is to encourage creative thinking of the undergraduate students in the field of kinematics, dynamics, mechanisms, machine analysis and design, robotics, and their applications. M/s Janatics India Pvt. Ltd. gladly agreed to sponsor this event. The competition consists of three stages and the theme of the competition was Increase In The Usage Of Pneumatics In Place Of Conventional System. 

In the first stage, students were asked to submit a two-page proposal on the conventional systems that students want to replace or modify by pneumatics. Student participation was encouraging in this stage, out of which thirteen proposals were selected for second stage of competition on the basis of feasibility by a group of experts.

In the next stage, the students, whose proposals were selected, developed their models and submitted a write-up explaining the working principle, hardware details, circuit diagram and a color photograph of their model. M/s Janatics supplied materials to some of the groups at very low cost. The response in this stage was poor.  None of the write-up revealed any creative thinking because the concepts were copied / borrowed from existing ones. Therefore, the expert committee withdrawn the competition and final stage was cancelled.

However, organizing committee decided to encourage the students and finally four group of students has been invited to attend the conference NaCoMM - 09 and present their model on 18th December 2009 during the conference.

We thank all the participants, experts, sponsoring organization (M/s Janatics India Pvt. Ltd.), Mr. Partho Bhowmik and Mr. Saikat Ghosh, for their kind help and timely support.