Currently many cities have carried out the experimental work of distribution automation in China. The In recent years, with rapid development of Unattended intelligent substation, substation intelligent inspection robot (SIR) had been widely applied. The paper selected the typical model of SIR, analyzed the status of key performance indicators. In conclusion, it gave improving suggestions on inspection capacity, motor function, anti-electromagnetic interference performance, surroundings adaptation and so on. It indicated that the mainstream of the application would be the robots posed characteristics of miniaturization,toolkited,centralizes in use, the relevant test standards should be accelerated, and the testing capacity should be improved, in order to assures quality of SIR.