The present invention provides an acoustic vector circular array mode-domain robust direction estimation method. The method includes the following steps that: the received signals P(t), Vx (t) and Vy (t) of an acoustic vector circular array acoustic pressure channel, an acoustic vector circular array vibration velocity x channel and an acoustic vector circular array vibration velocity y channel are obtained; the received signals Pe (t), Vex (t) and Vey(t) of a phase mode-domain acoustic pressure channel, a phase mode-domain vibration velocity x channel and a phase mode-domain vibration velocity y channel are obtained; Vex (t) and Vey(t) are rotated electronically, so that a combined vibration velocity Vec (t) can be obtained, a covariance matrix Repv is obtained based on Pe (t) and Vec (t), an unitary matrix Q is introduced to transform the matrix Repv, so that a real-value covariance matrix Rpv of mode-domain acoustic pressure and vibration velocity combined processing can be obtained; a steering vector a<~>r(Phi<~>) which has been subjected to mode-domain transformation and real-value processing is constrained, second-order cone programming is adopted to carry out solving, so that an optimal weight vector Omegarob can be obtained; and an output space spectrogram can be obtained based on the steering vector Omegarob which has been subjected to mode-domain transformation and unitary matrix real-value transformation, and a target direction can be obtained based on a spectrum peak position. With the method of the invention adopted, the problems of performance degradation and high signal-to-noise ratio processing threshold of a minimum variance distortionless response algorithm under a condition that related sound sources are difficult to distinguish and mismatching occurs can be solved. The method has the advantages of high resolution, high robustness, small amount of calculation, strong background noise suppression ability and the like.