Based on summary of advantages and disadvantages of common safety inspection methods,technology and equipment of underwater safety inspection are studied and some solutions are proposed,such as miniaturized high-power ROV,multi-beam combined ROV and intelligent unmanned ships.These solutions have addressed challenges of underwater inspection in complex environment such as deep-buried large-diameter long diversion tunnel,high-head multi-bend penstock and high-flow open water area.Moreover,these technologies have been successfully applied to cascade hydropower stations in the Yalong river basin,which is worthy of reference for similar projects.