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I finally figured out what was the issue! It is related to urdfdom and how it parses floating point values. The problem had been fixed, however it seems that the fix is not yet available in Melodic. This causes RViz to mishandle URDF-related plugins. The problem is reported, eg, here, and a quick solution is to change the environment variable LC_NUMERIC so that a point is used as decimal separator: export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8". In France the default definition was fr_FR.UTF-8, which assumes commas as decimal separator, and this caused plugins to wrongly interpret the URDF.