Smart grid construction is a goal of the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC). Transformer equipment, as the foundation of substation power supply and a critical component of the national power grid, requires stable operation. This paper proposes an early warning method for transformer equipment based on robot infrared temperature prediction, which mainly includes three parts: robot infrared temperature measurement, GWO-SVR temperature prediction based on historical equipment data, and determination of defect types according to heating defect classification standards for transformer equipment. This paper leverages the strong generalization ability of support vector regression (SVR), which maintains good prediction performance on small-sample data. To address limitations in the traditional SVR model caused by penalty factors and kernel function parameters, the Greey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is introduced to optimize parameters and achieve optimal selection. The resulting GWO-SVR model is used for equipment temperature prediction, and defect types are identified in advance using dual-level grading standards from the state and the Taizhou Power Bureau, enabling early warning of transformer equipment. Compared with the GRNN, BP neural network, SVR model, LSTM, and Attention-LSTM, the GWO-SVR achieves better performance in substation temperature prediction, as evaluated by mean absolute error (MAE) and mean square error (MSE) metrics. In addition, GWO-SVR enables heat fault early warning based on temperature prediction and classification standards of heating defects for transformer equipment. This paper contributes to the unique application context of State Grid intelligence with previously unaddressed challenges.