Steel-rubber bonded structures are widely used in aerospace, automotive manufacturing, and other fields, but their interface debonding can significantly reduce structural reliability and cause safety hazards. It is difficult for traditional inspection methods to accurately identify debonding defects. To this end, this paper proposes an active ultrasonic excitation based acoustic emission (AE) detection method. A controllable ultrasonic wave is excited by piezoelectric wafers to form a stable sound field in the steel-rubber bonded structure. The AE sensor is used to receive the signal, and the interface debonding state is judged by combining the energy characteristic analysis. Three types of debonding specimens (fully debonding, partially debonding, and non-debonding) were fabricated. Through theoretical analysis and COMSOL simulation, the propagation characteristics of elastic waves are revealed. The results show that the more severe the degree of debonding, the higher the energy intensity of the AE signal. The energy difference increases significantly with the increase of debonding depth.