Introducing myself

@binlki1 Welcome to the forum Kirk. I often see people both underestimate and overestimate the difficulty of a project idea. Slot car timing and scoring is easy, a self driving car has so far not been accomplished by any car manufacturer with millions of dollars and thousands of employees so that might be a stretch.

Taking a trash bin to the road means an object moving with speed and weight. That is a potential threat to innocent bystanders let alone family members. This is the 2nd in 2 days of this kind of dangerous concept.  Think about your child or dog sitting in the driveway being struck by a motorized trash bin. Can it be done, possibly with enough time (man years) and money (millions) but by a hobbyist? First call your lawyer and insurance agent for an opinion as to criminal liability.

@zander thanks Ron you bring up an excellent point with the trash bin.  I was basically thinking a beefed up line following type robot with collision dection .  As far as the self driving slotcar. Carrera does something similar to what I have in mind its called a ghost car . They are a larger scale setup and the tech is part of the track . My thought was to use hall effect sensors stragicly placed to provide location of the car .  Since it's a slotcar there is only throttle control to contend with. Maybe use esp32's on the espnow peer to peer transmit that back to a single processing point to control the voltage to the car? 

Thanks again for your input.  

@binlki1 Collision detection is fine for furniture but collision avoidance is more appropriate for living things. It's been decades since I saw a slot car so my views are dated for sure. It may be doable, but I am not sure about using Hall Effect sensors. I have some but have not worked with them yet. Be sure to keep us updated though in a new thread in the appropriate forum/sub-forum.

@binlki1 

An automated trash bin ( take trash bin to the road and bring it back.)

@robotbuilder Most of the video you can see the guy operating the controls so he is the collision detector and is 99.99999% of perfect. It's not that it can't be done, it's is it safe? In Canada not so bad but in the USA where they sue for looking at you crooked that would be a tort magnet. Full disclosure, I didn't watch the entire video and did not listen to any of the dialogue. I don't have a dog in the fight so don't really care, I was simply giving you the benefit of my training in risk analysis that IBM trained me in to use to red/green flag proposed projects.

@zander 

in the USA where they sue for looking at you crooked

If that is the case USA will never have self driving cars let alone free roaming robots. Such risks are usually covered with insurance. The guy was holding a laptop and I don't know if it was remote controlled in the demo but the claim was an autonomous robot. There was a clear use of fiducials for navigation.

@robotbuilder So you think the guy with the open laptop was just a random guy working from home randomly walking around outside? Then I got a great deal on Florida waterfront property, water on all 6 sides.

@zander 

No I didn't think he was a random guy,  clearly he was monitoring and or communicating with the robot as indeed I do with my autonomous robot that uses visual navigation and obstacle avoidance.

@binlki1

Welcome Kirk, I'm sure you'll figure a compromised design for the trash bin, minus steps!

Looking forward to reading progress.

Regards

Ron B