Abstract: As the guiding and limiting device of mine hoisting container in mines, the damage degree of the steel cage guide’s surface, the installation status of the steel cage guide beam and the position relationship between each cage guide will directly affect the safe operation of hoisting container. At present, there are some problems in manual inspection of steel cage guide, such as poor safety, low efficiency and high rate of missing inspection. In order to improve the inspection efficiency and safety of steel cage guide, a novel inspection robot model driven by magnetic wheel was proposed, and a prototype was trial produced. Firstly, according to the functional requirement analysis of the actual inspection condition of the shaft steel cage guide, the structure of the robot was designed, and the reliable operation conditions under the magnetic wheel drive were analyzed, and then the design size of the magnetic wheel was optimized. Secondly, based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF) method, the attitude of the designed robot was estimated with the help of accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetic sensor (collectively called MARG sensor system), and the gait planning for the efficient operation of the robot on the tank pavement was carried out by using the backstepping method. Finally, the performance of the robot was verified by simulation and experiment. The results show that: ① the proposed attitude estimation method can accurately estimate the real-time attitude of the robot, and the deviation floating range is kept within ± 0.1°; ② the designed inspection robot can realize fast and accurate tracking of straight line and circle tracks, and when the tracking time reaches 3 s, the local position error tends to be stable and converges to 0; ③ the designed patrol robot can realize the wall spanning movement, and when the rotational speed of the left and right steering engines is 0.1 m/s and the turning radius is 49.5mm, it can realize the turning of 0°-90°. A certain deviation will occur at the initial stage of the turning, and it will become stable when the deviation reaches about 1 mm.