My neighborhood has wheeled cans that you tip back and push toward the curb. I have been thinking about converting mine into a self-balancing trash can. Even if it had to move very slowly to avoid falling over, that's OK; it could take hours if it needed to.
Getting into the self-balancing state with a standard wheeled trashcan would require a large initial torque, more than enough to tip over the trashcan. There's no "moving slowly" when that's involved... either the control algorithm and motor works correctly, or there's trash all over the driveway.
If you built a completely custom trash can with the wheels in the center and a very small amount of ground clearance when balanced, you could drastically reduce the initial torque required, but at that point, concerns about needing to move slowly would probably be a lot less anyways since this is being fully engineered at that point, not just an attempt at a quick hack.
Alternatively, some of these wheeled cans have a bar in the front for the hydraulic arms, and you may could have a robot that aligns to that bar(if it exists--mine does) and then lifts it up via that, which seems to use much less force in my experiments[yes, I've been playing around with automated trashcan systems too lol].
