Target tracking is one of the most important applications of wireless sensor networks. Optimized computation and energy dissipation are critical requirements to save the limited resource of sensor nodes. A new robust and energy-efficient collaborative target tracking framework is proposed in this article. After a target is detected, only one active cluster is responsible for the tracking task at each time step. The tracking algorithm is distributed by passing the sensing and computation operations from one cluster to another. An event-driven cluster reforming scheme is also proposed for balancing energy consumption among nodes. Observations from three cluster members are chosen and a new class of particle filter termed cost-reference particle filter (CRPF) is introduced to estimate the target motion at the cluster head. This CRPF method is quite robust for wireless sensor network tracking applications because it drops the strong assumptions of knowing the probability distributions of the system process and observation noises. In simulation experiments, the performance of the proposed collaborative target tracking algorithm is evaluated by the metrics of tracking precision and network energy consumption.