The detection of pipeline in service is very important, but the existing manual detection has blind spots, long cycle, high risk, low precision and high cost. Therefore, it is very important to develop a mobile detection robot to replace manual inspection. This paper mainly introduces the control strategy of pipeline robot. In this paper, the overall control structure of the pipeline robot system is built, including the design of hardware framework and the design of software implementation process. Hardware design includes the selection design of microcontroller ARM, sensor, motor driver and so on. The software design is mainly the process design of action realization and the frame design of man-machine interactive operation panel structure. After the system construction is completed, the motion control experiment of the pipeline robot control system is carried out to test the walking performance of the pipeline robot prototype in the vertical variable diameter pipeline, and the motion control experiment is carried out to verify the rationality of the mechanical structure of the pipeline robot and the practicability of the control system.