Objects spawning and falling down immediately in Gazebo

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The IMHO cleanest approach for starting up Gazebo in cases like this is starting it in paused mode. You'll need to press the "play" button after things started up, but you'll have a very reproducible setup using only a single launch file. To start Gazebo paused, you have to provide it with the "-u" option. An example is the combination of these two launch files, using arguments: main launch file, common gazebo start launch file.

You can implement a 'wait for model' function in your model spawner if you have one, or use the '-wait' option in my spawn_model utility script.

you can turn off the gravity by adding

<turnGravityOff>true</turnGravityOff>

to your object model description file.