I caught up with Nick Montgomery last Friday to pick his brain a bit about the science project he'd completed earlier this spring.

Nick's a pretty unassuming kid on the phone, pleasant, well spoken and well mannered.

He's off to Virginia Tech in the fall to study mechanical engineering. He's a former baseball player who grew up patrolling the middle infield until a growth spurt turned the once unimposing second-baseman / shortstop into a rangy, 6-foot, 4-inch Hoover of a first-baseman.

"I think the coaches probably thought I made a pretty good target," he laughed.

He was home-schooled until high school when he traded in home for Freedom High School in South Riding.

That's also when he was chosen as one of the select few Loudoun County high school students to joint-ly attend Loudoun's Academy of Science (AOS), a math and science magnet school program for students in the county.

As part of their time at AOS, during their junior and senior years, students are required to develop a two-year research project of their own design working independently and collaboratively with peers, mentors, and scientists. Guidance is provided by faculty mentors on campus and from scientists from the regional network of universities and organizations as needed.

So what does a baseball-loving gear-head decide to focus on for two years of high school?

"I wanted to build a robot that could play baseball," said Nick. Really, as I discovered in our conversation, Nick wanted to build a robot that could pitch.

OK then….

"The big problem, especially for a robot, is that baseballs are spherical. The exterior of a baseball is composed of two identical pieces of leather tightly sewn together. To pitch successfully, you have to master certain grips for certain pitches: four-seamer, splitter, curve ball, cutter, slider and on and on. People automatically notice the orientation of a baseball and can adjust that orientation accordingly to get the grip they want for the pitch they want. Getting a robot to do that? That was harder."

Uh huh….

"So I created a vision system that would allow a robot to autonomously recognize a baseball's orientation when it picked it up and adjust it accordingly for a desired pitch."

Of course…..

"I had to build an apparatus that would allow me to quantify the movement of a ball in controlled rotation. That included taking over 100 different pictures of various rotations from a given starting point. Then I had to teach myself to use MATLAB®," said Nick, (enthusiastically, I could've sworn.)

What is MATLAB®, you ask? This is from the official website:

"MATLAB® is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables you to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran."

So you taught yourself a high level programming language and "environment" that you'd never used before so you could design a vision program that, in layman's terms, would theoretically allow a robot to autonomously complete a task that only a tiny fraction of the human population can perform and, for those who master it, can expect a lifetime of Midasian fame and fortune?

"Pretty much."

Sort of on a whim, Nick entered his final project in Google's inaugural Science Fair this spring. How'd that turn out?

"I made it to the top 60, which was pretty cool."

Out of how many applicants, Nick?

"Oh, about 7,500. From around the world."

My head's still swimming.

I let Nick go after about 45 minutes on the phone. He had to brush up his valedictory address for graduation. Really.