A playful child-size humanoid robot with a face inspired by comics and Japanese Noh theater is being used to help teach autistic children social skills. Kaspar (Kinesics and Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robots), developed at the U.K's University of Hertfordshire, has a minimally expressive face so it doesn't "overwhelm" its play partners with social cues, thus allowing them to individually interpret the expressions as "happy," "neutral," "surprised," and so on, as they interact with the robot toy. Makers of the bot--which has been in development for a few years now but is currently on display to the public through Friday at London's Science Museum--deliberately took a low-cost approach to Kaspar so future research or commercial versions would be simple to make and easy to transport with on-board processing and battery power. They built the robot for $2,500 using a child-shaped mannequin for the body's base, off-the-shelf parts, and silicone-rubber RoboSkin with embedded tactile sensors that detect different kinds of touch. Kaspar has minimal motors, only enough to simulate the most salient gestures involved in human communication.