This paper addresses the problem of collaborative tracking of dynamic targets
in wireless sensor networks. A novel distributed linear estimator, which is a
version of a distributed Kalman filter, is derived. We prove that the filter is
mean square consistent in the case of static target estimation. When large
sensor networks are deployed, it is common that the sensors do not have good
knowledge of their locations, which affects the target estimation procedure.
Unlike most existing approaches for target tracking, we investigate the
performance of our filter when the sensor poses need to be estimated by an
auxiliary localization procedure. The sensors are localized via a distributed
Jacobi algorithm from noisy relative measurements. We prove strong convergence
guarantees for the localization method and in turn for the joint localization
and target estimation approach. The performance of our algorithms is
demonstrated in simulation on environmental monitoring and target tracking
tasks.