Applying the inspection robot to the automatic reading of the meter in the substation can reduce the labor cost and improve the work efficiency, but because the instrument is usually suspended in the high place, the posture of the robot is severely restricted in order to obtain accurate reading. In addition, the time consumption of PTZ adjustment during robot reading greatly reduces the inspection efficiency. In order to solve this problem, by analyzing the observation window constraint, the route map constraint, and the time consumption of PTZ adjustment, at the cost of the total time for the robot to complete the inspection task, a robot path planning model for meter reading is established. Then, an ant colony optimization algorithm based on pheromone reuse is proposed to solve the inspection path and parking scheme of the robot. Simulation results show that the time consumption of the inspection path obtained by this method is 66% less than the initial time cost, thus verifying the effectiveness of the model and the feasibility of the algorithm.