Idiap Research Institute is one of the forerunners in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, this field is facing new challenges, with ever more extreme computing resource needs. In addition, collaborations are increasingly multidisciplinary, including players with little or no IT expertise, and the demand for openness and reproducibility from the scientific community is growing. In order to boost its future projects, the institute wants to build an innovative collaborative research infrastructure, CollabCloud, based on cloud computing. To demonstrate the potential of this platform, we are also proposing a sub-project to demonstrate the applicability of this system to robotics and, more specifically, human-robot interaction.