Aiming at the operation difficulty of disease manual detection on the bottom of the bridge, the working principle of the bridge inspection robot is introduced. Combined with the structural characteristics of the bridge and the constraints of visual inspection shooting parameters, the operation planning and position & pose optimization method of bridge inspection robot are studied. Firstly, a position and pose planning method for shooting operation of bridge inspection robot with the best shooting model constraint is proposed. Based on the optimal shooting planning method, aiming at the folding structure on the bottom of the small box girder bridge and T beam bridge, a shooting position and pose optimization method with the safety shooting model as constraint is studied. The weight function combining the shooting angle and shooting distance is designed. The optimization algorithm formula is derived and the convergence provement is given. Then, through the configuration of different shooting parameters, the simulation of the shooting operation position and pose planning method for hollow slab bridge is carried out. At the same time, on the basis of the simulation results of the position and pose planning, the simulation of the position and pose optimization method is also carried out. Finally, taking the developed bridge inspection robot as the target, field test and verification were carried out. The simulation and experiment results show that the proposed planning and optimization method meets the requirements of bridge shooting detection, and has good robustness and realtime performance.