New electromechanical transducers with high energy output, high strains, high mechanical compliance, lightweight, damage-tolerance and low cost can enable needed advances in a variety of applications, such as robotics, automation and biomedical devices. The perceived need for improved transducer performance, which has progressively emerged in the last few decades, has drawn considerable efforts for the development of devices relying on materials with intrinsic transduction properties. These materials, often termed “smart” or “intelligent”, include improved piezoelectrics and magnetostrictive or shape-memory materials
