First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. The paper considers global and local path planning for multiple agents in 2-D with a centralized message-passing algorithm derived from the three-weight version of ADMM, an established algorithm. The contributions are clearly stated in the introduction: The authors decompose global planning optimization into several sub-problems they dub minimizers, which describe various planning objectives that comprise the larger overall problem to be solved. Minimizers are derived for avoiding inter-agent collisions, avoiding collisions with static obstacles, and for maximizing/minimizing kinetic energy or velocity. They also apply their approach to local planning by reformulating joint optimization.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We describe a novel approach for computing collision-free \emph{global} trajectories for $p$ agents with specified initial and final configurations, based on an improved version of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Compared with existing methods, our approach is naturally parallelizable and allows for incorporating different cost functionals with only minor adjustments. We apply our method to classical challenging instances and observe that its computational requirements scale well with $p$ for several cost functionals. We also show that a specialization of our algorithm can be used for {\em local} motion planning by solving the problem of joint optimization in velocity space.

We describe a novel approach for computing collision-free \emph{global} trajectories for $p$ agents with specified initial and final configurations, based on an improved version of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Compared with existing methods, our approach is naturally parallelizable and allows for incorporating different cost functionals with only minor adjustments. We apply our method to classical challenging instances and observe that its computational requirements scale well with $p$ for several cost functionals. We also show that a specialization of our algorithm can be used for {\em local} motion planning by solving the problem of joint optimization in velocity space. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.