Not a native speaker so I didn't know what an air table was. But since I've worked in labs, I recognized it from the picture accompanying the Wikipedia article:
Indeed — they're not cheap but if you need that, it's worth the cost. In this case you could probably avoid it simply by having the robot rescan the page if it detected a vibration but the research labs I used to support had experiments where that would have jeopardized months worth of work.
