The invention discloses an automatic identification method for inhaul cable jacket diseases based on transfer learning and inhaul cable robot, and the method comprises the steps: preparing a concretecrack picture, building a ResNet network model in deep learning, and carrying out training, to obtain a training model; obtaining a disease picture of a stay cable PE jacket, dividing the data set into a training set, a verification set and a test set, establishing a transfer learning model of the ResNet convolutional neural network, and training the model; and controlling the stay cable robot tocarry out image acquisition, and carrying out stay cable PE jacket disease automatic identification by using the trained ResNet model. The detection precision is high, the stay cable robot can replacemanual work to perform automatic crawling detection, the automation degree is high, real-time recognition can be achieved, efficiency is high, cost is low, and compared with a traditional manual detection method for stay cable PE jacket diseases, the method has obvious advantages.