The computational details related to calculating the acoustic radiation force on an object using a 2-D grid finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD) are presented. The method is based on propagating the stress and velocity fields through the grid and determining the energy flow with and without the object. The axial and radial acoustic radiation forces predicted by FDTD method are in excellent agreement with the results obtained by analytical evaluation of the scattering method. In particular, the results indicate that it is possible to trap the steel cylinder in the radial direction by optimizing the width of Gaussian source and the operation frequency. As the sizes of the relating objects are smaller than or comparable to wavelength, the algorithm presented here can be easily extended to 3-D and include torque computation algorithms, thus providing a highly flexible and universally usable computation engine.