The Araucaria Project. Infrared Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distances to
  Five Dwarf Galaxies in the Local Group
  We have obtained accurate near-infrared photometry of the Tip of the Red
Giant Branches in the Local Group galaxies Sculptor, NGC 6822, NGC 3109, IC
1613 and WLM. We have used the derived TRGB magnitudes together with the
absolute magnitude calibration of the near-infrared TRGB magnitude of Valenti,
Ferraro and Origlia to determine the distances of these five galaxies. The
statis- tical errors in the distance moduli are typically 4%. The systematic
uncertain- ties are dominated by the knowledge of the mean metallicities of the
red giant branches, and are in the range of 5-8%. We observe a slight (2%)
systematic difference between the distances derived from the J and K bands,
respectively, which is within the 1 {\sigma} errors of the distances. We
compare the new distances derived in this paper with other recent distance
determinations for our target galaxies and find excellent agreement. In
particular, the near-infrared TRGB distances to the four dwarf irregular
galaxies in the sample agree to better than 5% in each case with their Cepheid
distances obtained from infrared photome- try, indicating that there is no
appreciable systematic offset between these two fundamental techniques using
old and young stellar populations, respectively.
