It looks like the frame for a large, remote control car.
The prototype, metal attached to thick, black tires, is pushing a skirt across a Virginia forest floor.
For the watchers, it's a novelty, engineering in action, as the gears of the robot spin the wheels, propelling the innovation ahead.
But for the ticks – those creepy, crawly disease carriers that plague pets and people alike – this robot spells doom.
A group of veterans-turned-scientists say they've developed a tick killing robot – a roaming device that could eradicate the pesky arachnids from your property.
Dubbed Robo-Tic, the device could lessen cases of Lyme disease in North Carolina and across the United States.
They're trying to raise $50,000 to finish testing the technology. And they're doing the fundraising in Wilmington.
Co-inventor Jim Squire, a full-time professor at the Virginia Military Institute, has invented before. He, along with another scientist, created a device that allows people to communicate through thousands of feet of rock – a tool intended for mining disasters.
This time, the problem was a little closer to home. His son, four years old at the time, had two ticks. And pulling them off? Unpleasant.
"I thought, maybe we could build something that could navigate itself around and kill ticks," he says. "The smart thing to do, we realized, was not to attack the tick directly, but instead, use the fact that the tick is a hunter."
So, using science – heat, vibrations and carbon dioxide, specifically – Squire and team "tricked" the tick into think the robot was a warm body. The robot is imbedded with a tube that pumps out carbon dioxide, and drags a cloth across the ground.
"The ticks are pretty certain it's a creature," he says, adding that the robot then delivers a kick of a substance called pyrethrin. Ticks, attached to the skirt, absorb the substance and fall off, dying. And the robot leaves no pyrethrin in the environment. The current treatment for ticks is spraying an entire area, and the environmental impact can be horrific if you have pets, he points out.
Already, testing has begun at Old Dominion University in Virginia. But to really see what long-term impact the device will have means deploying in a lot of lawns. The initial test site in the Virginia woods saw ticks repopulating in two days "because there was an infinite supply."
But, if you have a fenced in area, a residential plot, he hypothesizes it could take two or three months for animals to vector new ticks into the area.
This summer the real testing begins, both in Virginia and in Massachusetts.
But that's only if Elizabeth Baker's Wilmington-based business team is successful. Baker, who taught at Wake Forest University between VMI and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where she currently works, met Squire at a faculty event by chance, years after he'd put the invention aside.
"She said, you guys are nuts, you have just got this sitting on your shelf," he says.
Baker says she plans to work with the North Carolina Military Business Center, and that she was attracted to North Carolina because "the entrepreneurial environment is really good for something like this project."
The goal is to obtain Small Business Innovation Research funding. "At that point, we'll be hiring folks," she says. "We plan to have our operations based in North Carolina."
The effort is "very dependent" on government funding, she says.
The project has already raised about $75,000. And, if all goes well, the full company could be up and running in a year, with a commercialized tick rover roaming yards in the next five years. The ultimate goal is to get the device into the hands of pest control companies who are already licensed to use pyrethrin, as well as the military, she says.
Jim Roberts, executive director for the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UNC-Wilmington, confirms the company, aptly called Tick Rover, will soon be the newest company at CIE.