The Air Bearing Advantage in High-Precision Positioning

All moving objects possess six degrees of freedom — three linear and three rotary. The task of a linear motion guideway is to eliminate, as closely as possible, five of these degrees of freedom, leaving a single rotary or linear axis of motion. Air bearings are the purest and highest-performance means of defining linear or rotary motion, and have substantial advantages over conventional mechanical guideways. These advantages become more pronounced as the desired resolution increases, and many aspects of high-precision positioning are uniquely enhanced when air bearing guideways are chosen.