National Engineering Robotics Contest is a joint project of National University of Sciences and Technology, STEM Careers Programme and Pakistan Science Foundation, to promote research in robotics and its related fields in Pakistan. We, from the Department of Mechatronics Engineering, CEME NUST, welcome you all to participate in 16th National Engineering Robotics Contest (NERC 2018). 

 This competition will provide a common environment for the integration and evaluation of various mechanical and electronics designs, control and path planning algorithms and agent architectures. Over the years, NERC has grown increasingly popular among students and also among university engineering departments across the country. Engineering students from all over Pakistan participate in this competition. We indeed value the interest that our participants have shown and pledge to bring exciting new challenges every year for the advancement of robotics community at an increasingly wider scale. 

 Robotics is a buzz word at today’s technology forefronts. Due to exponential advancements in fields like high performance computing, computer vision, computer networks, material sciences and power electronics, the growth experienced by robotics in past few years is unprecedented. Robotics is the only field which can add precision while replacing the slow manual labor in contemporary industrial world. Thus this field faces enormous pressure from industry to produce all-purpose mobile manipulator robots which can perform simple tasks like grab, navigate and place objects at desired locations autonomously. 

The future of Pakistan relies heavily on advancement in the fields of engineering and science and events of this nature will encourage and motivate students to improve their technical skills in leaps and bounds. The theme of NERC, hence, is to design and develop autonomous robots that can localize themselves in unknown environments, determine the location of colored boxes to pot balls, and plan their motion accordingly with the help of a map.