With the ongoing progress of industrial technology such as shipbuilding, the importance of weld quality in industrial production is becoming increasingly prominent. Intelligent and automated welding seam inspection robots are more efficient than traditional manual inspection and can avoid dangerous accidents. This article describes the design of a welding seam inspection robot suitable for high-altitude ship operation. The robot uses machine vision and object segmentation models to automatically detect the position of welding seams, and uses a cubic polynomial to fit the welding seam path. The upper and lower computers of the robot communicate through WIFI transmission and TCP protocol, which can realize remote real-time detection of weld surface defects. In addition, this article designs a permanent magnet adsorption structure for robot high-altitude wall climbing, which has been verified through simulation and experimental verification. To verify the intelligence of the robot, this paper conducted performance analysis experiments on weld line recognition and tracking models and surface defect models. The experimental results showed that the average detection accuracy of the weld line recognition and tracking algorithm was 96.8%, and the average detection accuracy of surface defects in the three types of welds was 94.2%. The method proposed in this article combines two algorithms and a special robot structure, providing a new approach for the automated inspection of welds in large industrial products such as ships.