Imagine an outdoor Roomba that trundles around your yard, automatically killing the ticks that can give you Lyme disease. If you’re screaming “I want one!” you aren’t alone.

“Not a week goes by that I don’t have somebody asking me to purchase the tick rover, or test it in their yards,” said James Squire, who got an electrical engineering Ph.D. from MIT and teaches at the Virginia Military Institute. “I once got a call from a lawyer in Belgium … of all places.”

Squire patented what he calls the Tick Rover clear back in 2006. But you can’t buy one, which says a lot about the difficult of turning ideas into products, and the state of funding for research.

The design is pretty straightforward and takes advantage of tick behavior. Ticks don’t jump on their victims; they just stand around with their forelegs in the air and grab you as you brush past.

This habit explains why researchers collect the eight-legged beasts for studies about such things as the prevalence of the Lyme disease bacteria via “tick dragging.” You just need to walk through a tick-infested area, such as your yard next to the woods, and drag a piece of white fabric behind you. At the end of the jaunt, you’ll find plenty of ticks clinging to it.

The Tick Rover is basically just an autonomous little robot that does your tick dragging.

Squire and associates have made two improvements. The fabric it drags is “spritzed” with permethrin, an insecticide that kills the ticks, and the rover is preceded by small blasts of carbon dioxide, which attracts more ticks within its reach. (Mammals exhale CO2, so ticks and other biting insects use the gas as a guide to find us.)

This design works so well, said Squire, that when a biologist first ran tests “she thought she’d made a mistake in her experimental protocol” because it attracted every single tick in the test area. It has been tested elsewhere since, including on Cape Cod earlier this month with researchers from UMass-Amherst.

So why isn’t the Tick Robert being sold? Two reasons, Squire says.

One is a corporate mismatch between the obvious investors. Pest extermination companies don’t know what to do with robots and robot companies don’t know anything about bugs, so neither was interested.

The other reason involves the cutback in government money for basic scientific research, which has kept him from answering a basic question about the rover: Once it gets rid of ticks in a yard, how long do they stay gone?

“The next step is to do a residential test, see how long it can go between treatments,” said Squire. “There is scientific literature that leads us to believe it will be weeks, that ticks slowly repopulate … but we need to do tests to be certain.”

Those tests must involve multiple yard sizes, long periods of time, and varied protocols, and would cost perhaps $50,000. That’s nothing by corporate standards but it’s more than a researcher at a small institution can fork over, so Squire went looking for research grants.

“Pre-2007-ish, it was relatively easy to get scientific grants to do research. Now, funding is very difficult to come by,” he said.

He’s had no luck so far, but when I talked to him, he was heading to see Holly Gaff, an assistant professor in the Old Dominion University’s Department of Biological Sciences, in hopes that she could use the rover as part of other research for which she has funding, thus indirectly doing the necessary tests.

He hopes that the tests will be done by the end of the summer, which will let him get further grants to make the prototype ready for the market – which is harder than it sounds.

“The prototypes cost about $2,000 each and take about 100 hours of my time, my students’ time. They would be prohibitively expensive to sell,” Squire said. “We need to re-engineer them for manufacture-ability. Based on my experience with other products, I think it would probably take about a quarter of a million (dollars) to re-manufacture them for mass production and do small production runs.”

A quarter of a million dollars is approximately nothing in today’s manufacturing world; BAE Systems probably spends that much on lug nuts in an afternoon. So I have high hopes that it will happen.

It is, frankly, a little puzzling that a cool device which takes aim at a very big and growing problem, which means it has a very big and growing market, hasn’t seen the light of day.

Come on, capitalism – do your stuff. Speaking as a guy who pulled a tick off himself just yesterday, I want a Tick Rover!

GraniteGeek appears Mondays in The Telegraph. David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531, dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com or @GraniteGeek.