That cannot be true, as the project has yet to start. But anyone can start a crawler, so you may have encountered other people's software. We wouldn't be so unknowledgeable to ignore robots.txt ;-)
It was a crawler with the user agent "hgf AlphaXCrawl/0.1 (+https://www.fim.uni-passau.de/data-science/forschung/open-se...)", operated by the University Passau and Open Search Foundation named on your landing page. It would be a mighty big coincidence if this wasn't a project connected to this endeavor, especially when it confirms being an experimental crawler of said project at the UA URL.