"WARNING: no messages received and simulated time is active. Is /clock being published?" - Force Torque

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Running ubuntu 16.04, ROS kinetic, gazebo 7.

Trying to implement a force torque sensor model onto the end-effector of a sawyer robot. Model was successfully implemented, but plugin doesn't publish any data. I get the warning from the question title. Yes, /clock is being published because calling "rostopic echo /clock" will show the simulation clock.

warning occurs when i call "rostopic echo /right_hand_ft_sensor/ft_sensor_topic

I've found solutions where it suggests to call the following: "rosparam set use_sim_time false" and that hasn't fixed anything.

I've also seen solutions where it says to set the update_rate of the sensor to 0 in the robot.urdf. I can't try this solution because my sawyer.urdf does not contain the relevant section in the code where i would can set it the update rate to 0. the sensor package is based on xacro and i just include in the launch file of the sawyer robot.

any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated.