With the rapid development of China’s electrical industry, the safe operation of electrical facilities is very important for social stability and people’s property safety. The failure detection method of conventional electrical equipment is hand detection, which has high experience of the detection person, lacks detection and error detection, and the detection efficiency is low. With the development of artificial intelligence technology, computer-assisted substation inspection is now possible, and substation inspection using an intelligent inspection robot equipped with an infrared device is one of the main substation inspection methods. In this paper, experiments are carried out using several neural network models. For example, if a faster region convolutional neural networks (RCNN) infrared detection model is employed, a good vg16 in the feature region of the extracted image takes into account the quality of the infrared image and the presence of multiple devices. Infrared images can be used to determine the basic features of various electronic devices. In order to detect targets in infrared images of electrical equipment, the fast RCNN target detection algorithm is used, and the overall recognition accuracy reaches 83.1%, and a good application effect is obtained.