Soft gripper has attracted increasing attention because of its superior adaptability and excellent protection ability for grasping precise

fragile and vulnerable parts. However

it is still challengeable to realize the simple control of the soft gripper and multi-steady driving. In this paper

a soft gripper with variable stiffness is proposed

thereby the flexible fingers consist of liquid crystal elastomer material with active shrinkage deformation and variable stiffness material thermoplastic polyurethane elastomer (TPU) with phase transformation. Through partially heating different blocks of the flexible fingers

the stiffness of the material can be controlled to realize finger's bending. Particularly

a bending angle variation of 110° can be achieved under a heating power of 2 W

while it can recover to normal state within 70 s. Demonstration of the soft gripper has verified the performance of variable stiffness and bending movement of the flexible fingers.