[Jared Russell]

Polycarbonate doesn't have 100% transmittance for near IR, but it's still very high. You will get a small amplitude return from polycarb, which will be higher if there are scratches or dirt on the surface, or if you are getting specular returns from other light sources. You can configure the LIDAR-Lite to present either the strongest, first, or last return to you, and I'd expect whatever is behind the panel to be the strongest return the vast majority of the time (but not always).

Experientially, LIDAR sucks for detecting transparent objects and requires lots of signal processing and integration of multiple scans over time to have any chance of accurately detecting a transparent object.