The rigid-flexible coupling hyper-redundant intelligent sensing mechanical arm comprises a mechanical arm body, an operation device and a driving mechanism are arranged at the front end and the rear end of the mechanical arm body respectively, and the mechanical arm body is formed by sequentially connecting a plurality of bending units; each bending unit comprises a plurality of middle sections connected in sequence, base sections are arranged at the two ends of each middle section, the base sections and the middle sections are of hollow cylindrical structures, the base sections and the middle sections are movably connected through cross hinges, and every two adjacent middle sections are movably connected through cross hinges; the driving mechanism comprises a plurality of driving motors, reels are arranged on rotating shafts of the driving motors, a plurality of tendon ropes are arranged in the bending unit, one ends of the tendon ropes are fixed to the front end of the bending unit, and the other ends of the tendon ropes are connected with the reels respectively. The mechanical arm has the advantages of modularization, super-redundancy self-adaption, high space environment adaptability, measurable tail end pose, perceptible external contact and the like, and can be used for capturing and grabbing non-cooperative and cooperative targets and internal investigation of complex cavities.