Inspection Robot

A robot that patrols places like substations, tunnels, or equipment rooms to check on equipment instead of a person.

Inspection robots are a category of special-purpose robots that move to a series of checkpoints — either along a preset route or by navigating autonomously — and use a visible-light camera to read gauges and meters, an infrared thermal camera to check temperatures, and gas or acoustic sensors to detect leaks or abnormal sounds, raising an alert if something looks off. By how they move, they fall into wheeled, tracked, rail-mounted (running on a track fixed to the ceiling of an equipment room), quadruped, and drone types; wheeled designs are the most mature, while quadrupeds handle rubble, stairs, and other rough terrain better. The power industry adopted them earliest and most widely; Chinese vendors in the space include Yijiahe, State Grid Intelligence, and Shenhao Technology. Inspection is one of the earlier embodied-robotics use cases with a clear, calculable return on investment, and in recent years these robots have started using vision-language models for defect recognition.

ExampleA wheeled inspection robot at a substation circles the site on a set schedule every day, reading oil-level gauges and switch states, and uses an infrared thermal camera to spot overheating connectors.

Also called

Intelligent Inspection Robot, Patrol Robot

Related

Special-purpose Robot · Quadruped Robot · Autonomous Mobile Robot · Real-world Deployment · Thermal Camera · DEEP Robotics

Sources

2025年中国变电站设备巡检机器人行业市场现状及趋势研判_智研咨询 (Chinese)

As of

2026-05