The invention relates to a universal technology in the field of robots, and particularly discloses a robot operating system and method based on video incremental learning. The robot operating method comprises the steps that S1, a target positioning model is constructed, and pre-training processing is conducted on an MS-COCO data set; S2, an increment classification model is constructed, and pre-training processing is conducted on an ImageNet data set; S3, incremental training is conducted on the existing models based on a new target; and S4, the position of the selected target is positioned, and the grabbing movement track of a mechanical arm is constructed. According to the system and method, based on a detection-classification two-stage normal form, different from a general classification problem, a classification task based on video information has additional time information, different target postures are beneficial to constructing a better classification module, and the problem of low-resolution recognition under unfavorable conditions such as darkness and the like can be solved.