arXiv2025
The adoption of agroecological practices in modern agriculture requires robotic systems capable of operating in highly diverse and complex field environments. Developing and evaluating such systems relies heavily on simulation, yet generating realistic and configurable 3D environments representative of agroecological diversity remains a major challenge. This paper presents CropCraft, an open-source procedural world generator built on Blender and Python, designed to produce 3D simulation environments tailored to agricultural robotics. CropCraft generates crop fields from a simple YAML configuration file, supporting a wide range of scenarios including intercropping, vineyards, and weed-infested fields. The tool includes a library of 3D plant models (crops, grasses, and weeds) at multiple growth stages, and uses stochastic placement algorithms to realistically reproduce the spatial variability observed in real fields. Generated worlds are directly importable into the Gazebo simulator and include ground-truth annotations for all placed elements, supporting both perception and navigation algorithm development. To demonstrate the practical utility of CropCraft, we apply it to the task of crop-weed semantic segmentation using deep learning. A dataset of 10,000 synthetic images of maize fields with varying weed densities, growth stages, and lighting conditions was generated and used to train several segmentation architectures. Models trained exclusively on synthetic data achieve a sim-to-real gap of approximately 10% mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on real field images, outperforming previous state-of-the-art synthetic generation approaches. We further show that combining even a few real images with synthetic data improves generalization across domains, providing new insights into the effective use of synthetic data for agricultural perception tasks.