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.
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.
1. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5923/85