The problem of stabilization of a force-reflecting telerobotic system in presence of time delay in the communication channel is addressed. We introduce an approach that is based on application of the input-to-output stability (IOS) small gain theorem for functional differential equations (FDEs). A version of the stabilization algorithm as well as its two adaptive extensions are proposed. For all these control schemes, the input-to-state stability (ISS) of the overall telerobotic system is guaranteed in the global, global practical, or semiglobal practical sense for any constant communication delay under the assumption that the environmental dynamics satisfy a weak form of finite-gain stability property. As an intermediate step, we formulate and prove a general IOS (ISS) small gain result for FDEs. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.