How to modify a link's visual programmatically from a sensor plugin?

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It might be possible to modify a visual from a sensor plugin, but since that's not what sensor plugins are designed to do, it might take some effort. Actually I suspect it might be impossible...

I think the "proper" way to change a visual from anything other than a VisualPlugin would be to use the transport layer to publish a message to the ~/visual topic. In fact, that's what the physics library does under the hood when you call things like physics::Link::SetVisualPose.

So to change the visual pose, you could do:

this->visPub = this->node->Advertise<msgs::Visual>("~/visual", 200);

msgs::Visual visual;
visual.set_name(<vis name>);
visual.set_parent_name(<link name>);
visual.set_parent_id(<link id>);
msgs::Set(visual.mutable_pose(), <desired pose>);
this->visPub->Publish(visual);

You can see the visual message description here.