The field of robotic chefs in the kitchen presents unique challenges that require bimanual manipulation to attain human-level dexterity. The incorporation of a second robot arm is widely believed to enhance the manipulation capabilities and open up new research and practical applications. However, identifying the overarching challenges and specific module-related obstacles that have impeded progress in leveraging this novelty for the benefit of humans remains a pressing issue. Addressing these challenges necessitates a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective that goes beyond solving isolated component-level problems. It is imperative for roboticists from academia and industry to collaborate, jointly reviewing, re-investigating, reshaping, and driving advancements in this research domain (ICRA2024 theme “CONNECT+”). To guide our discussions, we have formulated the following question as a focal point for the workshop:

For the sake of real-world application:

• What are the key challenges in bimanual manipulation for robotic chefs in the kitchen?

• How can interdisciplinary collaboration enable innovative solutions, overcoming these obstacles to advance the research and practical implementation of robotic chefs?

•  How to transfer bimanual manipulation skills from human expert chefs to robots?

• How to benchmark the robot’s cooking abilities?

• What kind of sensor modalities are useful for robotic kitchen manipulation tasks?

• How to best exploit the roles of manipulators for different functions in kitchen manipulation tasks, sensing, grasping, manipulation, exploration, etc?

• How could computing tools, such as neural networks (including LLM), be a game changer for the dual/multi-arm coordination and manipulation for robotic kitchen tasks?

• How to model the cooperation between human and robot chiefs so that the task can be implemented in an optimal way by taking into consideration the human preferences?

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