Actually it says that in the first few paragraphs; and the rest of the article heavily implies the same.
Reading more on the original sources and I think it's a bit of both worlds. The robot was given a set of initial data plus the problem it was facing and it iteratively created experiments - at each stage deciding which experiment to do next to improve it's "knowledge" and progress towards the goal.
From sciencemag.com [1]:
The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both.
