If you're walking around London during the rest of the summer you might see a small, autonomous robot whizz past, laden with food stuff as it goes about its deliveries. You might even have a take-away delivered to your door by one.

Starship Technologies is starting a testing programme this month to see if it is feasible for its proprietary self-driving robots to work in London and other European cities, with the ultimate aim of launching them as an everyday service.

British partners include Just Eat and Pronto.co.uk. They will help test the robots run actual deliveries. The 'bots have been soft tested over the last nine months, in 12 different countries, but this will be the first time they will carry food, groceries or packages to actual locations.

They can deliver produce within a three-mile radius, so better even than many bike couriers associated with restaurants.

Starship Technologies claims that during its previous testing, its robots have travelled close to 5,000 miles, meeting over 400,000 people along the way without a single incident.

Other European partners during the trials include Hermes and German retailer Metro Group.

The test programmes will run in London, Dusseldorf, Bern and another, currently unannounced, German city.

"As soon as we saw the Starship delivery robot we knew this was the solution we'd been looking for in our mission to make it even easier for people to access quality, affordable food at the touch of a button," said the CEO and co-founder of Pronto.