How to stop NavMeshAgent separating from Animator? - unity3d

Question

I am working on a research project that uses a NavMeshAgent. I currently have a very simple scene where an agent is spawn at the start, walks through an "entrance" trigger collider, an "exit" trigger collider, then ultimately collides with a "destroyer" trigger collider with a script that ends the scene. Nothing complex, no physics collisions should be occurring.
I've been running some simulations both in the editor and in -batchmode -nographics via an executable that logs a basic runtime statistic when the scene ends. I found that in both the Unity editor and the CLI execution that occasionally the scene's execution time would spike. I finally caught what was happening in action- the NavMeshAgent component was becoming detached from my agent and floating out in front of it.
In this picture you can see the two colliders on the agent (one very small through his body for physics and one larger one for his "personal space",) the exit trigger collider (the giant red box on the right,) and floating between the two is a capsule-shaped NavMeshAgent component.
I used this unity page detailing how to use NavMeshAgents with animators, but after recreating their recommended setup, I am still having the issue.
Does anyone have any solutions for anchoring the NavMeshAgent to the agent itself?

Answer 1

I met exactly the same problem, where making the NavMeshAgent component a child and setting the NavMeshAgent's local position in every frame solved the problem.
private NavMeshAgent agent;
void Awake()
{
agent = gameObject.GetComponentInChildren<NavMeshAgent>();
anim = gameObject.GetComponent<Animator> ();
}
private void Update()
{
agent.transform.localPosition = Vector3.zero;
// todo:
// set animator
}
void OnAnimatorMove ()
{
// Update position to agent position
transform.position = agent.nextPosition;
}

Answer 2

For those of you who stumbled here, but for whom the accepted answer did not work. Make sure that navMeshAgent.updatePosition is set to true or that it is not changed within a script. This could be the cause of the separation.
NavMeshAgent navMeshAgent;
// This may cause the agent to separate
navMeshAgent.updatePosition = false;
// This will make sure it is synced
navMeshAgent.updatePosition = true;
This works as of version 2022.1 of the Unity API. Here are the docs for the function : https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AI.NavMeshAgent-updatePosition.html