This paper investigates the choice of function approximator for an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) based control strategy. The ADP strategy allows the user to derive an improved control policy given a simulation model and some starting control policy (or alternatively, closed-loop identification data), while circumventing the 'curse-of-dimensionality' of the traditional dynamic programming approach. In ADP, one fits a function approximator to state vs. 'cost-to-go' data and solves the Bellman equation with the approximator in an iterative manner. A proper choice and design of function approximator is critical for convergence of the iteration and the quality of final learned control policy, because an approximation error can grow quickly in the loop of optimization and function approximation. Typical classes of approximators used in related approaches are parameterized global approximators (e.g. artificial neural networks) and nonparametric local averagers (e.g. k-nearest neighbor). In this paper, we assert on the basis of some case studies and a theoretical result that a certain type of local averagers should be preferred over global approximators as the former ensures monotonic convergence of the iteration. However, a converged cost-to-go function does not necessarily lead to a stable control policy on-line due to the problem of over-extrapolation. To cope with this difficulty, we propose that a penalty term be included in the objective function in each minimization to discourage the optimizer from finding a solution in the regions of state space where the local data density is inadequately low. A nonparametric density estimator, which can be naturally combined with a local averager, is employed for this purpose. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.