A new approach to planning collision-free motions for general real-life six degrees of freedom (d.o.f.) manipulators is presented. It is based on a simple object model previously developed. The complexity of the general collision detection problem is reduced, and realistic collision-free paths are efficiently found onCS planes. A heuristic evaluation function with a real physical sense is introduced, and computational cost is reduced to the strictly necessary by selecting the most adequate level of representation. A general algorithm is defined for 6 d.o.f. robots that yields good results for actual robot models with complex design structures with the aid of various heuristic techniques. The problem of adaptive motion is also considered.