Power system restoration has attracted more attention and made great progress recently. Research progress of the power system restoration from 2006 to 2016 is reviewed in this paper, including black-start, network reconfiguration and load restoration. Some emerging methods and key techniques are also discussed in the context of the integration of variable renewable energy and development of the smart grid. There is a long way to go to achieve automatic self-healing in bulk power systems because of its extreme complexity. However, rapidly developing artificial intelligence technology will eventually enable the step-by-step dynamic decision-making based on the situation awareness of supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA) and wide area measurement systems (WAMS) in the near future.