Nature over nurture with a dose of AI innovation powers TREKK Design Group

It was a nurture-over-nature startup, born out of a commitment to innovation. For the son of a construction company owner and the daughter of a car dealership entrepreneur, it was not a big leap to think that Trent and Kimberly Robinett might start their own company someday.

They met at the University of Missouri – Kansas City in the 90s while he studied civil engineering and she studied electrical engineering. After working at a couple of engineering consulting firms and the Missouri Department of Transportation, Trent shared some of the struggles with finding qualified Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) firms to satisfy project requirements. Kimberly saw the need for a firm that kept up with the latest advancements in engineering technology, and floated the idea of starting their own.

“Kim said, I think I could do that,” stated Trent, and in 2002 they founded their own engineering services firm. Just as they came to that decision, nature almost overcame nurture: Kimberly was expecting twin girls. Trent told her, “Well I guess we'll have to put it off,” and Kimberly responded with “Hell no! We're going to do this!” Nurture won, and TREKK Design Group LLC was also born that year.

Established as a certified Woman-owned DBE, TREKK was able to fast-track access to state engineering services contracts, and today operates from 11 offices in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas and Tennessee, employing 227 professionals on public and private sector transportation, surveying and municipal water engineering projects.

PreView, and the deer camera

TREKK has won multiple “Champions of Business” and “Best Places to Work” honors from the Kansas City and St. Louis Business Journals, and a 2024 Business Excellence Award for Innovation from the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce. That innovation award recognized TREKK's patented PreView underground storm and sanitary sewer pipe viewing technology, which combines high tech cameras with TREKK's AI-driven Waterspout data collection and delivery system. Trent says the system was conceived after “a young engineer in the company threw a deer camera down a sewer pipe to see what was going on, and it grew from there”.

PreView gives clients a better understanding of the condition of their systems, helps them prioritize improvements, and then design practical solutions that respect budgetary constraints. It lets them find and fix issues proactively while investigating underground problems in real time from the safety of a monitoring screen, helping cities avoid sewer backups, wastewater overflows and other costly breakages.

TREKK's technology relies on machine learning: it can train its cameras on an underground site, monitor for overflows and, if there is an anomaly, machine learning algorithms spot it in the image data and trigger an alert for operators, who can scroll through thousands of images taken over time to determine the root cause.

Choosing a software partner

TREKK has machine learning experts in its ranks, but made the decision to seek out a best-of-breed software vendor with demonstrated success in wastewater systems. That led the team to infinitii ai. Some TREKK employees were already familiar with infinitii flowworks from previous jobs.

“We are capable of writing our own code,” said Trent, “but we realized that the backbone of our Waterspout system needed an overhaul. And at the same time we reached the conclusion that we really had to get out of the software business to focus on what we do best.”

After a project completed that spring to integrate infinitii flowworks with TREKK PreView, “Waterspout powered by infinitii ai” was rolled out to 11 TREKK clients including municipalities and other engineering services companies. “We're getting great feedback,” stated Trent, “and are very pleased to see infinitii ai quickly responding to client input from the field.”

Trent says infinitii flowworks and its support team excel in the unique world of municipal water systems, where no two operating environments are alike. “Inevitably, each client instance has its own engineering context and data types. FlowWorks is built with that in mind. It's not a one-size-fits-all, and their development team is nimble enough to work with us to solve unique problems as they come up. Like us, they're driven by continuous improvement and want to push to the next level. That's the key to success with our partnership.”

“With machine learning capability, it's no longer out of sight out of mind,” he continues. “We can pinpoint and avoid problems without the need to send crews into sometimes dangerous environments. This completely replaces the old way of delivering a PDF report of a site inspection that might have been done a month ago and isn't relevant anymore.”

While TREKK does a lot of work with large municipal clients in Kansas City, Saint Louis and Omaha, Trent wants the team to scale what it has learned so that any sized community can benefit. “It doesn't matter how big or small the city is,” he said. “They're all dealing with the same pipe maintenance issues and financial constraints, so they can all benefit from the marriage of real-time data and remote underground visual confirmation.”

First published on the infinitii ai blog. infinitii ai is the company behind infinitii flowworks.